“I am like a pizza, hot, delicious and always willing to share. If you can make me laugh, you already have a point in your favor. Do you dare to join my adventure?” This bio for Tinder has been written by ChatGPT. Artificial intelligence aspires to change the rules of the game in finding a partner. Thousands of users turn to apps and bots that answer for them in applications like Bumble or Tinder to get dates and thus find a partner. Some users claim to have been successful. But many voices also point out the risks of this dehumanizing intervention, since the previous conversation is the test to which we subject others to choose to meet in person.
Apps like RIZZ suggest responses for chats. Others like YourMove AI promise to “help overcome the initial writer’s block of staring at a conversation wondering what to say.” This is how Dmitri Mirakyan, co-founder of this latest app, which has more than 100,000 users from more than 90 countries, explains it: “Imagine that it is seven in the morning and you are on the train that takes you to work looking at three photos and a description of six words and trying to find a clever way to start a conversation. It’s not for lack of charisma, it’s hard to build a relationship with a stranger over a text message.”
There are services that go further. This is the case of CupidBot, which promises to “make dates while you sleep.” Its goal is to save the user time and effort: search for people of their type in apps like Bumble and chat for them. “All our users have to do is show up for appointments and evaluate compatibility in person,” say its creators, who claim that this service has more than 10,000 clients in the United States, France, the United Kingdom, Spain and Germany.
The service, whose price starts at $30 per month (about 28 euros), allows you to adjust the chat style, pace and objectives. Among the most popular tones are good guy, dick, rich, curious, witty, indifferent or stable — a mixture of all of the above. But the customization doesn’t end there. The user can choose to have the bot behave similarly to Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe, James Bond, Captain Jack Sparrow or Giacomo Casanova.
And how does this service know which people are “your type”? From CupidBot they have asked the users themselves for help to train the artificial intelligence to find possible suitors. In their Discord channel, they ask them, for example, to “tag” profiles about women with data such as whether they are “thin, chubby or fat,” reaffirming those male prejudices. “We offer [una cuenta] free for life to the first 50 people who tag 500 new profiles on their favorite dating app. “We are renewing our sliding motor and we would like to receive more help,” they point out.
Users use Discord to share their expectations and “wins.” Some are looking for a long distance relationship. “I travel a lot and the girls in my current city aren’t really my type,” says one of them. Another considers the love “market” to be “laborious and annoying,” but remains hopeful: “I hope this artificial intelligence really works.” Some have done well. While one claims to have saved 15 hours by “swiping between profiles”, another claims to have obtained two phone numbers in just five minutes. There are even those who announce that they cancel their subscription because they have been lucky: “I have had an average of three dates a week. “I met someone fantastic and now we have a healthy relationship.”
Dishonesty at the origin
This type of bot tries to find compatible people on dating apps and arrange a time and place to meet with them. “If we normally talk about the interaction between two people, here we are talking about the interaction between a person and a machine. This has some complications,” warns Elena Daprá, a health psychologist specialized in psychological well-being and section coordinator of the official College of Psychology of Madrid.
To begin with, the expert highlights that the relationship is based on deception: not telling the other person that it is a bot who is flirting with them. “What is it that draws our attention in the relationship with the other? Knowing that we are special,” says the psychologist. In this case, what is being said to the other person is “you are not a priority, you are not special to me, I am not going to spend my time on you.”
As a matter of emotional responsibility, the psychologist recommends notifying other people that a bot is being used to flirt. Something that might not be well received, logically. Some warn that apps like CupidBot make “online dating even less safe for women.” “The man you have been talking to and researching may not actually be the person who showed up for the appointment. “This is extremely scary at best,” says one user on Reddit.
For her, this is “especially concerning, since those initial conversations are used to detect red flags.” His post has been liked by 606 users and has 95 comments. Another user comments that she usually pays attention to the first interactions to sense “if the other person is safe.” “It’s worrying that you could end up on a date with someone you haven’t vetted in any way,” she notes.
Find a partner at all costs
“It would seem bad to me if someone used those apps to answer me,” says Belén Benito. This 29-year-old Bumble and Tinder user considers that using artificial intelligence in this way “is a way of contributing to people being consumed and dehumanizing them.” “It seems that the only thing you want is to reach that final stage in which you meet that person and if it is not that person, it is someone else, but not enjoy the path of talking to someone and taking into consideration that they are an individual who has feelings” , he maintains. She gets the feeling that those who use these services seek to “find a partner at all costs and do so in a very consumerist and capitalist way, as if it were a piece of clothing that I already know I want, but I don’t even want to try it on.” .
There are emotions that Benito doubts that these apps. “That person may be sad, happy or afraid and I don’t think that artificial intelligence can capture that, something that would prevent me from knowing the emotional part of the other person, that is, their I full”. Added to this is another possible drawback, as Daprá points out: that of meeting a person and verifying that their behavior differs from what they have shown on the dating app. “Because he doesn’t respond the same way, he’s shy or too outgoing or it’s different from what I’ve seen,” she says. And that is something that is noticeable in “how we express ourselves, the jokes we make or when we laugh.”
From CupidBot they know that there are those who think that “tricking potential dates into thinking they are talking to an intelligent, successful, well-spoken, charming and witty person instead of an artificial intelligence is dishonest.” “We don’t think so,” say company sources, who insist that users must select the desired tone and pace of their automated conversations, in addition to providing texts that they themselves have written.
Because CupidBot imitates a user’s personality, its creators believe that “if used as a short resource, it should cause minimal discomfort to third parties.” “Our goal is not to clutter the app with artificial conversations or objectify women, but to force apps appointments to reevaluate how they work and, in the meantime, make dating easier,” they maintain.
And they go further: they imagine a future in which a system is capable of predicting the attraction between two users and brings them together. “At some point, it will seem unthinkable that people would spend hours talking to strangers on an app to gauge the likelihood of attraction, when the only effective indicator for this is real-life interaction. It is in that world where artificial intelligence will facilitate human interaction instead of replacing it,” they conclude.
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