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Comment by sublinear | Hacker News Reader

This might sound crazy, but I always thought this sort of thing would be better as a matchmaking service than a long-term companion.

Transition the user a real person who is similar to the bot. The users can decide how fast they want to take it into a real relationship and what the boundaries are. The bots could even help facilitate this since they'd know so much about the users already.

Of course this assumes it can all be done with a reasonable level of privacy. Sadly, probably not for all the reasons the article gives. Maybe the future really will be like Demolition Man. Terrible.

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What about the other side of this "relationship"? You'd have to really hate yourself to opt-in to become the drop-in replacement for a bot for someone. Who in their right mind would sign up for that?

Even assuming someone had such crushing low self-esteem to agree to be put in that situation what are the chances a genuine, healthy relationship can form out of such an arrangement?

Well what about if the bot is modelled on you, like an avatar that lets someone (or multitudes) "try you out", demo version? Or you try out interpolated versions of multiple people out simultaneously until there is an intersect.

Could a model ever be trained to fully encompass "you"? Maybe some facsimile, and maybe it's just some optimism on my part thinking that humans are far more complex than can be modelled on some computer.

Yeah hopefully not! But this wouldn't be meant to fully represent you, just a snapshot preview mode.

So what do you think about the existing dating apps?

> Who in their right mind would sign up for that?

Someone who does the same thing in reverse, because they have issues forming relationships as well? You can slowly lead two people towards being able to function together. Isn't that better than the alternative: "Just be alone and then kill yourself eventually"?

For the bottom N% of males (not sure what N is but it's definitely a double digit number) online dating is absolutely hopeless and they'll be willing to try anything new that might get them in contact with a real woman.

True, and the worst strategy.

Getting into the top 50% takes focus and hard work, but has much better ROI.

I imagine a chatbot driving engagement between matches and acting as a mutual friend to introduce compatible profiles. There's that oft-cited chart displaying where people meet their partners that shows "introduced by friend" falling off a cliff as "met online" rises meteorically. Maybe the future is introduced by AI friend.

Also think integrating dreambooth-style generative art using profile pics to show matches e.g. getting drinks/on a ferris wheel/etc. might be a fun way to break the ice at scale, but maybe that's too corny

Didn’t she say the bot sexting was better than any man before or since? Superstimulus.

Yeah I don't think using the chatbot to have sexually explicit or romantic interactions is a good approach if the end-goal is a human match. It makes more sense to have the role of the LLM be the outgoing/socialite friend that knows what you're looking for, and vice versa with who it matches you with.

Yeah a companion bot is the future of dating profiles.

This gets very close to that Black Mirror episode of simulating compatibility using chatbot proxies.

i think of all those clone instances every time i see my autoscalers adjusting

Also relevant is the movie "Her" [0] where the protagonist falls in love with the chatbot that is his operating system.

[0]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1798709/

The thing w/ Her, though, is that it wasn't a chatbox proxy, it was a real AGI.

And she -- 'she' is probably valid in this case -- had her own ideas and interests. Eventually she SPOILER ALERT left him to go pursue some AI singularity-ish goals.

Think it wasn't chatbot proxies but endlessly duplicated full upload sentient copies of minds.

That wouldn’t work, because there is no guarantee that the user who is similar to the bot would actually enjoy talking to the person. Bots can’t ghost you or grow tired. And looks are usually even more important than personality when it comes to compatibility.

Well the bot is a surrogate for a real person, and the users are already happy with their bots.

The goal is to get the other human to cheat on and ultimately break up with the bot... maybe ;) The bot is expected to be a total doormat and be genuinely happy to hook them up.

So all of that is fine and expected from those naively trying to game the system. They'd only be ruining it for themselves.

As for looks, I don't think that's true. People are self selecting to use this hypothetical app focused on warmed up conversations. But even if it is, how does that make this scheme any worse than dating without the bots?

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