The Guardian reported the arrival of “Fate” and, friends, I laughed. Or maybe I cried.
This is apparently the first “agent AI dating app”. An AI personality called “Fate” interviews users, runs data matching on their hopes and dreams, then suggests five possible matches based on hard data complemented by observable language patterning, “No swiping involved!”.
It has been followed by similar AI-based matching platforms Stitch and Keeper in the US. In platform variations, you can have preference data extended to hair color, you can be coached by the dataset’s animated electronic voice on how to approach your date, and you can cry for the end of human connection and the loveless wasteland of consumer narcissism that we have created for ourselves. When the most profound and transformative of human emotions become automated transactions in an online shop, the tech bosses win.
In the depths of my growing neo-Luddite despair I am forced to admit that what is now a common-denominator story was not what consumers actually demanded.
What people wanted from AI in dating apps has been replaced by what some data-hungry, rich-dork megacorp thinks they should need. Studies conducted in Europe showed that users only wanted AI tools to “eliminate fake profiles and flag toxic users”.
You know, how writers just wanted contextual proofing tools from AI, but they got machines insisting on the superiority of rewritten, flattened text. Or how academics needed a tool to index their references and they got a hallucination that invented some sources that didn’t actually exist, but the machine thought maybe they should.
Insert your own industry experience here, and we’re all in the sad recognition that the forced AI-ization of everyday life continues with a robotic efficiency that, dear Christ, is outsourcing the messy human awkwardness that made us attractive and alien to each other — and sexy and wonderful.
We’re clearly adapting to the universal decimation of the human experience because, as the Guardian article shows, people are using these new apps – in love, at work and in an educational setting that ensures students learn to signal and nothing else.
I guess humanity can no longer handle its own mess or surprises and, as is wont to do, the Internet is to blame.
The problem with AI as a romantic channel used to be the risk of falling in love with a mirror-machine. With a few personalized prompts you can create an imaginary soulmate that admires your vanity and ignores your mistakes as it talks to you and you masturbate. It was just like a real relationship, but without the mutual self-reflection that encourages intimacy and growth.
Just a few minutes ago we thought encouraging this was destructive digital narcissism. Now I keep wondering whether there is any human self-survival instinct in this, given what our self-subscription to a massive digital surveillance state is doing to us socially.
It wasn’t long ago that social media introduced us to the concept of digital network oversharing. From the video of the man who wondered what it would be like to spank his sister (no, I won’t share that) to the health of novelist Joyce Carol Oates’ feet (no, again), we were all learning a lot about each other.
Now, out of an abundance of caution, we know less. As every stray, 10-year-old tweet can be weaponized, so it seems many people are being held back by a new paranoia when it comes to self-disclosure. Well, we can say “publish and be damned” but you can’t impose privacy controls on your ex-spouse.
I have written about this new undersharing before. It’s unsettling today to feel nostalgic for the privacy appeal of the pre-Fate era, of digital Heathcliffs and text-based waifs who were only going to share your most intimate secrets with the billionaires who owned them rather than collating a dataset to reveal them to your life.
But whether you choose to love a robot or cause a robot to love you, Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted these unnatural transhuman intimacy more than half a century ago in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He warned in 1964 that interactive media would take away “our eyes, ears and nerves” and I think about all the time.
McLuhan’s work was the inspiration for David Cronenberg’s 1983 body-horror, Videodrome. Given that a study by Italian researchers has proven that if you are still dipping into the conceptual pissoir known as brainwashing yourself With hard-right pee, but videodrome The scale of remaining in objective reality To believe that you are being blown away by the television, it is fair to say that the remote control is in our hands and has entered the TV chat.
Can we put it down? Perhaps not without the help of the law, given the arguments made before a jury in Los Angeles in a landmark case in which the plaintiffs insist that social media platforms are “flawed products designed to exploit vulnerabilities in the minds of young people,” as reported by NPR.
The outcome could actually force governments to step up the platform regulation that has prompted bans on social media for children in Australia, Malaysia and elsewhere.
Do we have to wait until “AI-arranged marriages” become a thing before governments realize we are running out of time?
Roll over, humanity. Luck is here.
