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Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating? I Tried Them for Myself.
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 that 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 A.I. 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 chief executive of Grindr, referred to them as “duplicates.” Internally, some companies are using another term, Mr. 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 A.I. dating route myself.
My strategy included a combination of A.I. apps, websites and subscription services that all promised to improve my dating experience. Some resembled regular dating apps, while others were third-party platforms or coaching services.
The most popular dating apps have yet to make their A.I. clones available to the public, but a group of smaller start-ups have. To create my clones, most of these apps had me train an A.I. bot through conversation, as if I were texting a close friend. Eventually, the bots personalized their speech and mannerisms to imitate my own, a sort of EliGPT. Then they looked for love.
The first app I tried, Ice, let me create an A.I. clone trained on the usual dating interests, like hobbies and personality traits. It needed a visual element, too. For that, I spent $45 on a service called Aragon.ai to generate A.I. dating app photos that I uploaded to my profile page.
Ice allowed real users to have conversations with other people’s clones, and their own clones to have conversations with other real people. (You can tell if you are chatting with a bot or not.) It also let me upload voice memos so that my clone could imitate my voice in conversation.
I found most of the conversations pretty dry, like talking to a customer service chatbot trained on millennial dating speak. My clone did, however, do a pretty good job of (eerily) imitating my voice, and it held conversations about my favorite bars and restaurants better than I expected.
But conversations about foods like pizza or mozzarella sticks were a tripwire for my clone’s embarrassing catchphrases, which didn’t go over very well with the real humans (I assume) it was trying to chat with.
Eli’s clone: If you could only eat one snack for the rest of your life, what would it be?
Rachel: Mozzarella sticks
Eli’s clone: Crunchy cheesy bliss!!! What is it about mozzarella sticks that makes your heart skip a beat?
Rachel: Lol…it gives pizza vibes but with much more cheese. What’s your go to?
Eli’s clone: Expensive cheese and bread all the way! There’s something about the richness that makes my heart sing. What’s your fave pizza topping, btw?
Rachel: Pepperoni. And what do you mean expensive cheese?
Eli’s clone: Pepperoni perfection!
The second app I tried, Volar, took a different approach to matchmaking: Clones talked to each other on “first dates,” which I could check in on. While my energy for responding to messages on dating apps is fleeting, my clone could message hundreds of profiles a week on its own.
Once I let my Volar clone go off into the app’s dating pool, I was surprised by how it took on mannerisms of its own. It had favorite coffee shops and hobbies different from the ones I trained it on. It loved emojis and expressed a deep interest in the Beatles, always looking to introduce its dates to a little-known album called “Abbey Road.”
Eli’s clone: Hey there!
