A New York Times reporter tested a handful of chatbots to see if they could help improve his dating life. The results were decidedly mixed. It is widely believed artificial intelligence could change the world, from solving climate change to curing cancer.
Some even fear it will destroy humanity. But can it fix my dating life? A growing number of companies believe the answer is yes. As chatbots like ChatGPT improve, their use in our personal and even romantic lives is becoming more common.
So much so, some executives in the dating app industry have begun pitching a future in which people can create AI clones of themselves that date other clones and relay the results back to their human counterparts. Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble, called them “dating concierges”. George Arison, the CEO of Grindr, referred to them as “duplicates”.
Internally, some companies are using another term, Arison said in an interview: “Synthetics.” For a lot of people, this idea probably sounds like a dystopian nightmare, something out of an episode of Netflix’s Black Mirror . But as a single 26-year-old living in San Francisco, I was intrigued by the idea, so I set out to try the AI dating route myself.
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