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Comment by FigurativeVoid | Hacker News Reader

While I haven't been in the dating pool for a while, I still get a huge number of dating related ads.

One of the trends that I notice is that there are many more 'AI dating coach' services that seem geared at helping people continue interesting conversations or appear funnier or more intelligent than they are.

I see the appeal, as my wife will be the first to tell you I do not do well over text, but I can't help but see these as totally immoral tools.

I think the end result will be that people will get a sense for when an AI is talking to them, in the same way we have a sense for fake accounts. But as these tools get better, that might not be the case.

Also, I look forward to seeing people on dates that were arranged by their respective agents lol.

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> totally immoral tools

Is grammarly immoral? Or spell checks? Or googling “good text responses to a hinge match?”

I don’t like the idea of chatting with an ai on behalf of a human, but I don’t know if it’s immoral.

I expect that we’ll just do more FaceTimes and rely on Apple to cut out ai layers of video.

Not sure if it makes online dating better or worse.

If you believe in morals you'd believe so. They're filtering a person's thoughts when dating. Dating itself can be seen as immoral, especially in hookup culture.

If someone feels like they're speaking to grammarly, or a generic response from google they heard before, they revert to judging you by your looks as usual. If you are ugly none of the AI crap will work.

If you're ugly you're not getting matches anyway. It does nothing for ugly people. At the end of the day a person has to be attractive to some positive degree in order to find a partner.

It's very non-linear, such that conversation quality doesn't matter much.

A person below the attractiveness threshold gets basically no matches, so no chance to talk. A person above the threshold gets a huge number of "already motivated" matches, so no need for good talk. Conversation quality only matters for the small number of marginal cases (maybe 20% of users)

It's also algorithmically based. My number was likely shadow banned and I got basically no good matches ever. My friend used my number since he ran out and determined it gave him less matches, less quality, and even overseas it was terrible with HIS photos and my number.

The funny characteristic was that the number also matched me with my long term girlfriend and got him a single girl that he was interested in. I generally agree with your assessment, but I'd say out of 20% you still couldn't determine the AI user's intentions.

I've texted for my friends and I could get them a date or hookup but honestly when there's no motivation for them to do it themselves, it's a waste of time, they were not interested except to determine their conversation skills were the issue and not their looks.

It’s a tool.

Is it immoral to hire a dating coach to help with your profile?

Or a coach to revise your resume?

I think there’s some balance, but I think the key point is that the person takes responsibility for however they put together messages. Although interestingly, I guess it worked for the other person as they dated for a bit and I think he achieved his goal of dating this person.

If they are literally just having ChatGPT write messages whole cloth then they will suffer detection in person. But I think that’s more stupidity than morality.

I did have a friend mention how she dated someone who was amazing and thoughtful by text but very different in person or on the phone.

(at least for heterosexual pairings)

If you're a man, you're probably going to want AI to "assist" you with replies to maximize your chances of success with your (relatively few) matches. If you're a woman, you're going to want AI to manage the dozens of conversations in-flight at any given time. We're probably moving toward a world where AIs are flirting with AIs totally open loop.

Do (heterosexual) males really have that bad of a match rate?

Why not treat it like a job hunt or a sales process? Figure out requirements, optimize your profile to attract mates with those requirements?

Sure, “seed” the matches by reaching out to profiles which meet your requirements. Try sending intelligent messages, catchy subject line etc. Stand out. Tighten your efforts to mates you find strong compatibility with.

If you want to see it in action, just create a male profile, post some stock photos and a bio that you think represent a “normal” guy, and start swiping.

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