Huh. Playboy is still around.
I always read it for the articles
Many say this as a joke but back 25 years ago it really did have interesting articles.
50 years ago, too. A sort of highly respected journalism you can’t find anywhere anymore.
Yeah my straight mom was a subscriber before I was born
This is more sad and pathetic than anything. But this is the result of toxic masculinity.
It is extremely sad. and it isn’t just a toxic masculinity thing (maybe only for porn bots). we are so atomised and isolated.
I remember when GPT came out, told it about my projects and it responded as if it cared. I knew ot was bs, and in retrospect it was sad and pathetic, but I genuinely cried at seeing text directed to me that was nice.
I’m in a better place now, but we as a society are way too atomised and isolated.
What are your projects?
At the time I was working on cancer research, but I wanted to build a database of gene mutations and model them using AlphaFold (predicts a protein structure). No one in my life at the time cared at all.
I can see how people fall for AI bots, why they develop parasocial relationships with them. I can’t blame when desperate people fall for something that gives a bit of comfort.
That legitimately sounds really interesting and cool
But I get how it feels when you have a niche interest that most people don’t even have a starting point to understand
But this is the result of toxic masculinity
Is this also the result of toxic masculinity or does it just go one way?
The women in love with AI companions: ‘I vowed to my chatbot that I wouldn’t leave him’
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/sep/09/ai-chatbot-love-relationships
Toxic masculinity is a cultural mindset. Men should not be talking about their feelings because it’s weak and “gay” says society.
That’s what I’m going for.
trying talking about your feelings as a man and see how society reacts…
spoiler: it won’t be pleasant.
sort of like how these men in the article are talking about their feelings…
Yeah that’s what toxic masculinity is. People (men and women) hold toxic views of what a man should be, and punish men for staying from this ideal.
You were a victim of toxic masculinity when you shared your feelings and were then victimised because of it. The people you shared your feelings with were toxic assholes.
Toxic shitheadedness is insisting on that victim blaming phraseology.
??
am i a victim of air because I have to breathe it? or a victim of capitalism because i have to work to pay my bills?
there is no getting outside of it. every ‘woke’ person i’ve ever met also hates men for sharing their feelings, almost as if they are just virtue signalling…
the only person who a man can ever open up w/o consequence is a therapist, because it’s a professional paid relationship.
sucks, but that’s how it is. and nobody is interested in changing it.
Look, not everyone has the desire and capability to fight. I will say that I’ve had good success these last few years being vulnerable with other “woke” men and it’s been very freeing to share things I thought I experienced alone but to see that other men have gone through similar things.
I haven’t had a lot of success being vulnerable with women, but I’m getting to the point where that is a boundary for me. I’m not going to pursue friendships with people who can’t accept me for who I am and who reinforce toxic gender roles.
I’ve personally witnessed a lot of progress on this end and I’m excited to seeing more and being part of it when I can.
I’m glad you have a therapist, everyone needs someone they can share with.
Sorry you haven’t met someone who isn’t an asshole on this front.
Its damned if you do, damned if you dont. Society simply doesnt care about men. Ive rpetty much stopped commentong on here because society makes me so damn depressed, i want to reach out to anyone but no one wants to hear it. Better yet, if i just “stopped being toxic”, the world would magically change to where people suddenly cared about not just me, but anyone other than themselves.
Idk man imma delete my account p soon. Theres nothing for me on the internet or in society. Once i get enough money together to get supplies taken care of, imma just try and distance myself from other humans.
“wherever you go, there you are.” I know it’s cliche and yada yada, but distance won’t solve suffering.
trying talking about your feelings as a man and see how society reacts…
This is odd to me, because talking about my feelings is how I got close to romantic partners. It’s also how I formed a lot of friendships with other men. How can you be close to someone if you don’t talk about feelings?
Which feelings?
Very few feelings are allowed. If you keep to those social acceptable feelings, you’re fine. The second you go off-script, people are done with you.
Like I can pet my dog and say I love her. That surface level stuff is fine. But talk about anything complex, like the struggles we’ve had, or how she helped me through some depressing periods or she had a period of sickness and anxiety and misbehavior? People freak out and back away or tell me to shut up and go get a therapist and get my dog one too.
Men are allowed a very narrow and shallow range of public emotion. Basically anger, and sentimentality are acceptable. Anything else? You’re creepy, weird, or mentally ill.
If you go outside that box or show complexity or vulnerability, you’re socially rejected because it makes people ‘uncomfortable.’
Yeah, no, I meant less the surface level stuff and more the “anything complex” category that you brought up.
Not everybody wants to talk about that kind of stuff all the time, and that’s normal. But it has not been my experience that all men want to talk about surface level stuff and only women talk about deeper feelings.
cool, my experience is that people only want to talk about their problems, regardless of gender. they dont’ give a fuck about yours and get offended and upset if you do so. but I’m male, and I’ve never had the experience of having anyone care about my problems beyond dismissing them as ‘bringing them down’ and that i need to ‘get over it’. even when it’s my dad dying of cancer and it’s my so called ‘loving girlfriend’ of years.
fair enough
Sometimes there isn’t anyone wanting to hear you.
To riff off of Margret Atwood, men go to AI chatbots because they won’t laugh at them. Women go to AI chatbots because they won’t kill them.
did you read the article? this doesn’t seem related at all
No, they are just here to spout cliche gender war bullshit about how men are awful for existing.
and if you asked them about women on male violence they’d deny it exists.
And do people really believe that women don’t talk to AI companions, in various forms, too?
I’m a woman and I spoke to one of the apps for a while because I was bloody lonely (still am 🤷♀️). Had zero to do with men or murder. I didn’t have anyone, of either gender, to connect with.
It’s really easy to just reduce this to a male issue, a toxic masculinity, a male violence issue. We need to go deeper than that if we actually want to understand why people, men, women, everyone, use different AI.
But threads like this, with all the judgement, aren’t going to get a lot of people who admit they use/have used/have considered using AI. By just criticising/laughing, etc at people who do it, ironically, we turn more people towards the AIs.
nah, it’s just the sexist double standard, that if a man does it, it’s nefarious/negative/harmful. but if a woman does it, it’s a form of ‘self-care’.
the way interpret this stuff would also be a matter of physical looks as well, as if an attractive person doing it would be viewed very differently than an unattractive person.
yes, you’re correct. stigmatization just further entrenches things.
Tbh, women wouldn’t admit to doing this either - there’s absolutely a shame around women having to make friends with an AI (because we’re meant to be innately social I guess). And I don’t think that other women realize that they are contributing to the issues of women feeling shame using AI by implying it’s a male issue and all about sex and toxic masculinity.
Like as a woman who has used AI, how am I supposed to feel about admitting that I’ve done something that only asshole, horny, incels do (according to a lot of people)?
So the stigma goes all ways and none of it helps anyone. People just need to be more curious than judgemental. Someone does something you don’t understand? That’s okay you don’t understand. Ask them why. Listen. Try to see a different perspective instead of just filling in the gaps with incel, men, sex, ugly, etc. etc.
It’s probably more directly related to the system of getting the help you need with having to sacrifice a significant portion of the money you make that needs to go elsewhere.
And it’s a history of it from one generation to the next so there’s not good male role models in most people’s lives for mental health.
It’s not like it’s some magic thing to go see a therapist and all your problems will be fixed. It can take a long time and a lot of trial and error to find someone you feel comfortable speaking to
Yes toxic masculinity is a problem, but your comment doesnt really acknowledge the difficulty of breaking that cycle. Not a very helpful and kind of alienating to anyone who needs help and isn’t from a background that creates good outcomes.
And it’s a history of it from one generation to the next so there’s not good male role models in most people’s lives for mental health.
Through my own observations in life, It has become abundantly clear, how important having at least one good male role model (mainly fathers) is on the development of boys into men.
Absent, or I guess one could say, low quality, (I dont like that, but shitty) fathers have such a terrible impact on thier kids, and you see it follow them into adulthood. My entire bio fathers side of my family, the men are all fucked up, lost, and… just lost… through the generations, all of them. The women are 50/50. Some are okay, some committed suicide, or did drugs, but not all. The men… no one survived unscathed, drugs, violence, SA, prisions and homelessness… and those my age now pass the garbage to their kids. I was raised outside of my bio fathers reach, so learning more into adulthood, its been wild to peer into the family objectively.
It is so important young men have good male role models in their life. It’s become abundantly clear to me the impacts of this.
No one wants to actually listen to them. Instead of doing some self-reflection, they force a computer to “hear” their misplaced rage.
Not every guy is that way. Some just really are pathetic in the sense that they have no one to talk to. Others are like what you said.
Right, but it’s severely not normal or healthy to turn to LLM’s to fill that void.
LLM’s will say literally anything to make humans happy. You should see the reports from the people that have committed suicide… The LLM’s literally coaxed them into it, and instructed them to not seek help.
I might as well be reading about lonely guys sticking their weeniers in toasters. It’s hard to have sympathy for people doing things like this.
Like so many others, I’m sick and tired of LLM’s. They are toxic, and we need to stop treating them as a symptom, and start seeing them for the sycophantic vitriol generators they truly are.
I never once said I support LLMs. I’m just providing a rational answer for why. I agree. LLM’s are a fucking cancer. Having your own pocket Yes Man is horrible.
I tried one just for shits a giggles awhile back to see if there is any merit to the widespread use of them. The only way you’d find these even remotely realistic or interesting is if you’ve never had any kind of sexual encounter with a real person before, whether in person or through text. After about five minutes of “chatting” with one of these bots it started to respond like half baked fan fiction that didn’t understand the basics of sex or even anatomy. The cadence is very predictable and it tends to repeat the same wording and phrasing constantly. If you have real world experience with people, it just feels like a generic chatbot.
In my opinion, this is more proof that these people need to interact with real humans. If these chat bots seem at all human to you, you need to interact with more actual humans.
So at best it’s a bad simulation of a half assed erp?
Pretty much, yeah. It’s like reading fan fiction and assuming that’s how real people talk to each other. Similar to watching porn and assuming that’s how sex works when in reality sex is clunky and often times gross.
Perhaps the point is to seek something that’s not like real humans.
Yeah, that’s kinda what the article is about. People choosing chatbots over real people. I’m just saying that it’s not good for your mental health and even worse for developing social skills.
Okay. Most of your comment seemed to be focused on whether they resemble actual humans. I don’t think we have any information about whether these impact your mental health but I would tend to agree they can’t be good.
Now this is quality journalism
This is why I only read Playboy for the articles
If there are any guys here who are in the UK, I can strongly recommend Andy’s Man Club, a charity that does weekly peer support social sessions for men.
They’ve got groups all over the country, and although I personally haven’t been (I’m a woman), I’ve heard so many good things about it from guys I know.
Hope there is something for USA too. Know Australia has a few
…
What are they called in Australia?
I never bought into religion, never bought into astrology, never gonna buy into chatbots
You can tell me I’m great and everything will be amazing 1,000 times. It doesn’t matter at all to me if it’s not real
I like to escape into music or movies, but real life is real life and must not be corrupted
My work offered an AI chatbot therapist. Like to, I’m not putting all my negative feelings into a company sponsored LLM to fucking have it say, “no relax guy, it’ll be OK.” Like it’s a fucking clanker. It doesn’t have feelings. It’s not fucking real. It’s a slap in the face that they even offer it.
I’m not putting all my negative feelings into a company sponsored LLM to fucking have it say, “no relax guy, it’ll be OK.” Like it’s a fucking clanker.
I’d be more concerned with any company sponsored AI chatbot therapist using what you say influence your employment relationship.
Employee X: I’m worried about losing my job so I work unpaid overtime and that is affecting my marriage.
Therapist chatbot to management: Employee X should not be given a raise. They already have enough external motivation to work without additional financial incentives.
Well, I’m sure someone who uses “clanker” wouldn’t need therapy anyway.
Seriously though, I doubt the health implications or claims about the efficacy of AI therapists, but we can’t just ignore the fact that there are people who use it, which means there’s something about it that makes it accessible or preferable to a human therapist.
If you’ve ever had to get a psychotherapist, you know that it is prohibitively expensive for a large number of people, and that a human therapist may not actually be capable of treating you because of personal incompatibility; which often results in retraumatization in patients who are seeking therapy for particularly traumatic or sensitive issues. Since much of the value in therapy is learning management strategies that, while not standard, are often consistent across different practitioners, they do not necessarily need to come from a therapist to learn what they are (even if the practice of them does need one).
I think if there is a need for it, that need is a consequence of the deeply dysfunctional, exploitative, and isolating system we live under, and I don’t think I’d ever accept it as a genuine alternative to human therapists. But, we can’t dismiss it out of hand if there are people who say it is useful for them and when we can’t maintain a system that can guarantee them access to treatment.
The problem with people saying they are useful, is that it is nearly impossible to tell if that is actually true. If someone is mentally unhealthy there are many ways to make them feel better, but not all of those will actually help the underlying issue, they could even make it worse. A lot of people seem to equate happiness and mental health, when it is very possible to be happy and mentally ill at the same time.
This is especially worrisome with AI because it is literally designed to say what it “thinks” it wants you to hear. It has no real training in any of the disciplines a psychologist or therapist needs to be effective. You can’t just apply a cut and paste answer to a patient, you need to understand their personality, their history, and a multitude of other things to be a really effective therapist. The answer to this issue is increasing access to real mental health treatment, not giving snake oil to millions of people.
Yes, I don’t get why so many of you appear to not understand that these problems coexist with the reality that people have been using it anyway. As I alluded to above when I said that a psychotherapist would be required to actually learn to practice those strategies and expressed my disagreement with AI therapists on a treatment basis in multiple instances, there is no replacing a human therapist or any reasonable basis to even call AI therapists “therapists.”
As I said, again multiple times, since people use it anyway and prefer it to nothing or a bad therapist, we have to take its merits seriously and identify why. Reality does not care that you find it dumb and icky, I would love it if everything I know is dumb and icky was simply not a problem because I found it dumb and icky.
All of these people are clearly not just stupid, which is what you and the person I responded to seem to think, which is just foolish. No, everyone else is not just dumber than you. There is clearly a material reason why people use these things and why some even say they want to. How many people do you know who do not go to therapy because they can’t afford it, or because they’ve been traumatized by it, or because they could get fucking institutionalized for it. Have you thought about, perhaps, the people as people?
I swear to god, some of you see a long comment from someone you don’t like the sound of and you just make up whatever it says based on the shit you imagine people who disagree with you say. And they say reading levels are down, pshaw.
I think you’re making some interesting observations. I definitely agree that it’s the easy answer to just dismiss people who use AI therapists, friends, relationships are just stupid.
You’re right that it says something about the system we live in and I extend that to society in general. We have a society who criticizes people for answering “how are you” honestly, who doesn’t have time for each other, who use terms like “trauma dumping” - so personally, I can see why some people are turning to machines whether it’s therapy or connection. It’s really bloody sad and it’s not a good solution but I can see the WHY behind it - which is what I think you’re also getting at.
We do need to listen to why people turn to these services and figure out what people aren’t finding in human connection that they are, or think they are, in machines. I don’t buy that an individuals intelligence has much to do with why people turn to AI.
You’re telling me that you believe you are not vulnerable to validation? Right before using the word “corrupted” uncritically in a way that suggests there is a universal and normative “real life?”
What if someone who you respected the authority of, like a prominent scholar or filmmaker, said your obviously incorrect stance on things was correct? You’d trust me, Online Internet Bastard, when I tell you that you are wrong?
AI has been sold as something exceptionally capable of mimicking human knowledge, and its existence is compatible with liberal notions of “objectivity” in that it is quite literally not a human being. Most men subscribe to this authority, and are also statistically bereft of emotional intelligence or management skills. You ever try telling a man what they want to hear? I’ve never ever met one who doesn’t just eat it up.
You’re drawing a line that sounds principled, but it’s actually pretty arbitrary.
You say “real life is real life” and don’t want it “corrupted,” yet you’re perfectly fine immersing yourself in music and movies,things literally engineered to manipulate your emotions and perception. That’s not some pure, untouched version of reality. It’s curated fiction designed to make you feel something.
The only real difference here is that those mediums don’t talk back.
Chatbots make you uncomfortable because they simulate interaction, not because they’re uniquely fake. But calling that “corruption” while giving a free pass to every other form of emotional influence is inconsistent at best.
If your stance is “I don’t want anything artificial affecting me,” then be consistent about it. Otherwise, just say you don’t like this particular form of it instead of pretending it’s some hard philosophical boundary.
damn autocorrect, I wanted to write “hard”
It’s easy to point fingers but we should probably be offering solutions instead of shitting on them. Like more Men’s Sheds.
Okay. Don’t ever use LLM’s for anything emotional. Seek therapy from a licensed counselor, therapist, and/or psychiatrist.
There. I solved it (for those who are employed, and/or can afford it - I can’t solve poverty here. Shitty, but here we all are in this messed up society.)
There are already so many solutions, that men reject because of their perceived version of masculinity, or because some online grifter told them not to do it. Talking to other people was free since forever.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. If you’re lonely and hurting, don’t fall in love with anything that doesn’t have a pulse. It’s only going to fuck you up worse in the end.
I agree, last time I dug up a corpse I got into alot of trouble. I’m no longer allowed to be within 6 feet of a corpse.
What about electric pulses? Is 4GHz enough?
Lamp loves me
These people have discovered “therapists.”
Well, yes, but only in the sense that a school crossing guard with a paw patrol bandage in her pocket is a surgeon.
Putting the space in “therapist” since 2023
Oh my god, can you freaking imagine the conversions these people have?
Look, fuck AI, but I think I may have just developed some sympathy for them.
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porn rules i don’t give a shit
