Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating? I Tried Them for Myself

nytimes.com

16 points·laurex··3 comments

My first reaction was to dismiss this because of the clickbait headline. But then I remembered something called steelmanning that I saw mentioned here a few days ago. It's the opposite of strawmanning and means giving arguments you want to dismiss the strongest possible meaning first.

Rather than reading the headline as:

> Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating for everyone?

To which the answer is obviously no, try reading it as:

> Are A.I. Clones the Future of Dating for some people?

To which the answer is yes, definitely. In fact they already are, there are thousands of unfortunate lonely people around the world falling in love with chatbots and that number will grow as shady companies run by people without morals design their chatbots to exploit people's loneliness and inability to find real connections in our harsh modern world.

My first impression to your last paragraph was disappoint that we are using this sort of tech to solve this problem.

When I thought a little more, I realized it may not be a bad thing. This will solve an actual problem for real people in an area where many potential solutions have failed.

I do understand it seems weird today, but it may be a good thing.

For any headline ending in a question mark the answer is “no”.

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