AI isn’t just coming to the world of dating—it’s already here
Enlarge / "It looks like you're trying to hook up. Would you like help?" (credit: Aurich)
Shane Mac, CEO and co-founder of the conversational AI company Assist, had a problem. After spending most of his time and energy on keeping his young company running and funded, dealing with the semi-rote work of writing to strangers on dating sites was more of a time sink and emotional drain than he liked. So-following the law of the instrument-he created a bot to automate the task.
Mac is only one of many dating app users-so far, apparently all men-that the idea has occurred to. I first came across Mac's idea of semi-autonomous dating in an episode of former CNN technology reporter Laurie Segall's excellent podcast First Contact. After that, a bit more online research led me to a Mashable article that covers an entire world of AI-powered dating site gaming techniques-some of which even have public Github repositories.
Most of the men gaming the apps seem to be following the same script as an MMORPG resource harvesting script-a bot logs on to the site for them, swipes right repeatedly, and perhaps drops a basic introductory message to mutual swipes. The human player simply logs in later and collects the results of the bot's "harvesting" run.
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