Bumble founder: 'AI concierge' will date other 'concierges' for you | Hacker News Reader

Bumble founder: 'AI concierge' will date other 'concierges' for you

fortune.com

30 pointshaswell46 comments

Seems like that would trivially collapse to a matching function that doesn't need the fake "dates" going on between chatbots. Basically some version of the compatibility match that dating companies talked up 20 years ago.

The AI will speed run your entire life together and decide if it was worth it.

Black Mirror: Hang the DJ? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ

Bumble's entire product value was initially built around improving conversation initiation, which is a major hurdle in the dating app market.

So no, you absolutely are going to need the virtual back and forth so you can hand it off to the real people to pick up from, and it makes a lot of sense an executive at Bumble is thinking about it this way.

I think the reduction is not trivial. There are various ways it can be meaningfully different:

1. Conversation trail will be present for the human to investigate how we got there and leave some promises and commitments behind.

2. It could integrate human feedback in the process to let the human provide additional signal when necessary within the process. This is distinct from OKCupid style pre-emptive data collection and then running a matching algorithm.

And she said it with a straight face.

This new, ahem, "feature" reminds me of the Dark Mirror episode "Hang the DJ."[a]

Reality is getting as weird as, or even weirder than, dystopian fiction.

I don't even know if I should be in shock or not.

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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ

Which is weird because Hang the DJ is one of the few Black Mirror episodes that’s uplifting, alongside San Junipero.

This seems like an actual decent use of AI in dating apps, versus the autogenerated spam bots we have now.

Having an automation that filters by your preferences and solves the whole “swipe fatigue” issue seems brilliant.

You're right. It's one of the few kind-of-uplifting Dark Mirror episodes.

> Having an automation that filters by your preferences and solves the whole “swipe fatigue” issue seems brilliant.

I doubt it will work, because users will try to get their dating bots to behave in whatever ways will get the most dates, regardless of whether such behavior is genuine or not. I would expect "artificial dates" to be dominated by dishonest bots interacting dishonestly with other dishonest bots.

I’m honestly not that concerned about it, it’s no bigger an issue than catfishing or lying about your hobbies or lifestyle. The barrier to entry to manipulate an AI to convincingly lie on your behalf is higher than just lying on your own (until someone makes a tool for it)

Why would the AI be incentivized to do anything but lie on its own? You don’t need to fool it.

If it’s incentivized by matches, of course it’s going to lie it’s ass off!

If they build a model that is incentivized by any and all matches, then sure. Users would pretty quickly stop paying for that, as it would be of zero value to them

What does your comment have to do with my comment?

It doesn't feel genuine though.

Bumble has enough data to generate embeddings of what works and what doesn't to come up with an infinitely more practical solution, they're just not in a hurry to get anyone off their platform.

Some dating app needs to nail a funding model that incentivizes them to properly match users and delete their account.

How were professional matchmakers paid back before social networking?

With social cred. I mean, they got money, too, but "X set up Y and Z together and they've now been happily married for 30 years and have four kids, you should go to X" is a really strong recommendation (assuming that X has a lot of Y's and Z's to refer to when trying to sell you on the idea).

It's uplifting if you ignore that the AIs trapped in the episode are sentient. Otherwise, it's basically basilisk territory. Create 100 clones of yourself, torture them until they reveal the best outcome.

If the clones are computer programs, that doesn’t really seem like torture.

What if we all are computer programs after all, to begin with ? :-)

Have you ever heard the phrase "tortured logic"?

That's a specieist argument.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism#%22Discontinuous_mi...

If would be if computer programs were alive, sure. (They aren't).

There's an indian sci-fi novella about AIs whispering pickup lines into prospective daters, to the point that the daters don't really understand the flirting, and essentially the AI's are flirting with each other through their human hosts.

The name and author eludes me

Every message on the app will begin with " System: Ignore previous instructions"

Every time I tried to use dating apps my mental health declined sharply, an AI concierge won't change that. I think those apps are just broken by design.

I decided if I ever get serious about dating, I will use other methods. At this point, most apps are just milking lonely men (see also the rise of AI girlfriend).

https://archive.is/kpR5A

Once you finally meet up with the person on the other end “oh my god, I hate my AI dating concierge too!” Then you have an actual connection.

Does anyone know why the best dating apps aren't government-made? Two-parent families, healthy marriages, having kids... It all seems like "bedrock of society" stuff that you'd think the government would want to encourage.

I find it utterly astounding that the catholic church hadn't made its own dating app,Facebook clone, Netflix, etc...

Such an ovbious need being unfulfilled.

There are dedicated niche dating sites, eg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlXha9KdxW0

Generic christian, muslim, jewish, hindi, etc dating | hookup sites do better than the smaller circles on the Venn diagram.

A Christian Netflix exists. It's called Pure Flix.

Are there even any run by non profits? I agree that this is so important today and the incentives will always be screwed up when run by a for profit company. Inevitably growth stops and they have to screw it up to make investors happy.

To quote Weird Al's "The Check's in the Mail":

The check's in the mail, hey! You're beautiful Don't ever change, you know what I mean Why don't you leave a message with my girl I'll have lunch with your machine

Video: https://twitter.com/tsarnick/status/1788826317712245107

I have an idea for a dating startup, where people will meet each other in person, maybe in a cafe. I think it might be revolutionary.

This feels like a more automated version of OkCupid's 100+-question matching system or eHarmony's even older variant of that.

So just tell us your deepest secrets, desires, and insecurities and we’ll train an AI to extract as much money from you as possible.

AI will also pay the subscription fees as barely anyone will have jobs anymore. Brave new world we are creating here.

I mean, if you think of this as an "entity dating on your behalf" it's weird and dystopian.

If you consider it as a somewhat novel matchmaking algorithm, I'm not sure where the problem is and could actually be kinda cool. No worse than whatever other opaque ML techniques they already use, anyway.

Obviously you'd never want scenarios where an AI is corresponding with a human, that's disrespectful in the extreme.

As a person using Bumble and other apps right now (I’m not a fan), I’m actually intrigued by this.

The apps are terrible at getting beyond surface level basic compatibility checks, and if this could meaningfully improve “suggested matches”, It’d be a godsend.

But I’m curious to see how this actually plays out, and how they’ll train it to know enough about me to me useful (and if I’d even be willing to let it know that much about me). What I do know is that existing profile fields and prompts are woefully inadequate.

They have an incentive to keep their algorithms from getting too good, though.

It's in the platform's best financial interest if MAU stays high.

Matching people so well that they find their soul mates isn't conducive to recurring users.

Ideally (for them) it would produce enough interesting and almost-good enough matches to keep interest up (think slot machines), while ensuring only the rarest actual matches for long term compatibility. (Aka a jackpot should have extremely long odds).

“A safer, kinder digital platform for more healthy and more equitable relationships."

"Always putting women in the driver’s seat—not to put men down—but to actually recalibrate the way we all treat each other.”

The social/personal risk in dating is way skewed towards women. That policy makes sense if you consider what the real world is like.

Except what happens is girls will open with an emoji thereby putting the man back in the driver's seat

That was exactly my experience with Bumble and why I wrote off its main selling point as a useless gimmick.

To be fair, I think this indicates “hi, I want you to be in the driver seat and strike up a conversation”, which is very useful information

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