Tech and media cheerleaders want to believe that using technology to trick a human being into going on a date with you is actually a good thing
Over the last few months, there’s been a stream of stories in the media that try very hard to convince us that artificial intelligence – AI – is a wonderful new trend in dating app messaging technology. In other words, you don’t have to talk to your matches on dating apps any more – you can have one of the many new AI messaging apps do it, and the person it’s talking to never has to know that it’s not actually you flirting with them in that slightly stilted way.
On Valentine’s Day, Wired ran a piece that argued so strenuously in favor of these AI Cyranos you might almost think it had a stake in the success of this enterprise. “By normalizing this behavior,” said the piece, “we can free people from writing a thousand introductory messages, giving them energy to focus on the humans on the other side.”
Nancy Jo Sales is the author, most recently, of Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
