actually two different ideas converging

Yeah you might be right. Thanks for your responses either way :)

but conflating two things

I didnt say it was “the same thing” i said that its two things next to each other on the same directional trend axis of people requiring less and less to see something as representing a human interaction.

And yes of course a video of a virtual avatar with a TTS voice is less human like than a video of a real person with a real voice. Thats not ableist thats just reality. Questioning the humanity of the person behind those things would be ableist. In the first place, none of the things i originally listed are actually human, because they are fucking video files on the internet. Im not talking about the people behind it, but about the content they create and how closely it resembles the experience of sitting across the room from a real physical human.

But back to the topic. Of course morally, there is a meaningfully big jump between “has a human behind it” and “no human involved at all”, but if the user doesnt care or is unable to tell the difference, then that difference might as well be non existent when it comes to how society treats both. If people start treating robots like humans then whats the difference between humans and robots?

Well its the fact that one IS human and the other is NOT and i think its important not to blur that line too much. At the end of the day people seem to be very fucking willing to blur that line and that is actually a big sociological problem that is bound to become a legal problem sooner or later.

citation needed

Not really no. Not everything needs a citation. This was never an attempt at writing a scientific paper in a comment, just my own observation of people and internet culture. Make your own judgments.

Also yes i was thinking of things like Zentreya (idk what ELIZA is). There is a difference between each step in this progression i layed out in my first comment, but it is none the less all on the same axis of incremental removal of human characteristics.

To the average occasional viewer, the perceived jump from Zentreya to neurosama isnt very big.

People personifying and emotionally attaching themselves to a virtual avatar without a human voice is a slippery slope to LLM love. You are attached to something with zero apparent human characteristics at that point. Replacing the brain behind it with an LLM is just a small step from that. Specialized chat LLMs are incredibly good at seeming human.

Just using TTS itself for random stuff is different, but when you build an entire character around it that people are supposed to see as a person, then yes obviously.

The more human characteristics you remove, the harder it is to differentiate between something human and non human. Whether that is a problem or not is up to you to decide.

And this has actually been going on since before the pandemic. Shits fucked. This kinda parasocial shit is imo kind of a natural evolution from youtubers > streamers > vtubers > TTS vtubers > LLM TTS vtubers > LLMs

Literally happened to me two days ago. Everything was fine until i installed gpu drivers and then it said “plz give secure boot password” and i had to abort mid install. Also was infront of a fresh linux recruit.

Cost cutting measures due to inflation. Green ink is expensive.

Fake and gay for obvious reasons, but also based af.