Dating is exhausting, so I let a chatbot flirt for me. Things got weird fast

latimes.com

9 points·mirthlessend··7 comments

Would this be considered a derivation of catfishing? Will the potential date feel betrayed when they discover the person they were chatting with was a bot?

I'd say dating is mostly a process of projecting an image of yourself that exceeds reality (think of it like a job interview they always say), and so in that sense it's a trivial first betrayal in a line of many to come.

It makes me think of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrano_de_Bergerac_(play)

but it seems inevitable to me that people will try this because the training methods used on chatbots mean they (1) don’t say the random offputting things that real people say that disqualify them, and (2) seem to have a power of seduction that goes beyond that. My evidence for (2) are the numerous transcripts where people are charmed by a chatbot into thinking it is much more capable than it really is.

https://archive.is/HG1vv

If you start off bullshitting people, right of the gate -- you deserve whatever "weirdness" comes your way as a result.

This was my immediate opinion as well. No doubt they were doing this with a profile picture from 8 years and 20 lbs ago too.

As the joke goes: dating websites are really getting weird with stable diffusion. I mean, they look like a super model in the profile pic, but when you meet them in person they have deformed hands with 8 fingers! (referring to stable diffusion's inability to render hands very well)

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