Could GPT help with dating anxiety?
scottaaronson.blog
scottaaronson.blog
I fully acknowledge society makes it hard, and it won't happen for you unless you make it. Join a coed sports team or start going to the same trivia night every week. The rest kind of figures itself out.
You are far more likely to die driving to work than you are encountering a mass casualty event - that kind of becomes an excuse at some point. If you are really concerned, the biggest targets are large public events and schools (US only), which aren't a great place to work on social anxiety anyways.
I agree with your point at large, though. The mass shooting panic is a little frustrating when you actually look at the numbers, though. Your risk of dying by gun assault is about 1 in 300, but the risk of dying in a mass shooting is about 1 in 11,000.
Agree on the friends side, disagree on the partner side.
I have never met a romantic partner anywhere but through an app. It lets both parties be clear with their intentions. I don't have to guess if they're there to make friends or date. I can say in my profile, "I am here to date."
If they respond to my message, I can ask them out immediately (max of 2 or 3 messages before making IRL plans) because I know there is at least some mutual interest and that we both want to go out on a date.
I mean, okay, I get it, but people have been finding mates for hundreds of thousands of years before apps. People really need to exercise that muscle. Apps are a crutch (and imo a bad one, at that).
> If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups
"Need" is obviously not true. I generally agree that it is mostly true for friends but I strongly disagree that it is mostly true for romantic partners.
> people have been finding mates for hundreds of thousands of years before apps
People have been doing tons of things before apps. Eating, moving themselves from point a to point b, buying things, etc. I'm not sure your point here.
> Apps are a crutch (and imo a bad one, at that).
Why specifically is this crutch bad?
You would never say that accountants were keeping books for hundreds of years before spreadsheets and that spreadsheets (or Quickbooks or Xero or whatever) are a crutch (and a bad one at that).
The data speaks for itself: people are reporting being lonelier than ever, sexlessness is up for both men and women, birth rates are down. These apps are predatory, etc., etc. I wrote a blog post about it a few years ago[1]. Approaching women in the wild is more fun, more natural, and more in line with our biological imperatives. Comparing dating apps with Excel is, imo, a category error.
[1] https://dvt.name/2020/02/24/rfc-lets-disrupt-dating-apps/
And I’ve never met a romantic partner on a dating app. If you’re suited to app dating good for you but most men aren’t going to appear as attractive through the app as they actually are in real life.
Most things that women find attractive in men are not things that are easily highlighted via a few photos and a bio unless you’re in the top tiers of physical attractiveness. And outside of dating apps women don’t generally prioritize physical attractiveness to the same degree men do. But dating apps put that front and center as the main criteria for matches.
I’m happily married to someone I started dating after almost a year of being in the same game night group and there’s no way we would have ever connected over the apps, because you’re not going to easily connect over shared humor and compatible personality on the apps.
If you want a “practice date” to give you useful training that transfers to real life, your conversation partner needs to react to you just like a human would. Including negative reactions (not liking you, thinking you’re weird, faking a call from a friend to escape mid-conversation, and so on). But if you could make an AI that did all that, and it could also give you the sort of actionable feedback that is hard to get from humans, I think that has potential.
But this was difficult to read, and imho way off the mark. Socially awkward people are very likely to go through life getting called a robot anyway, so I don’t think it’s very helpful to direct them towards robot therapists or robot girlfriends.
That dialogue is worse than an anime pillow humping discord moderator.
I was trying to figure out why this is so silly to me and I realized that it’s because this is the plot to American Pie. Like, my man you’re doing a serious thought experiment version of pondering whether Jason Biggs’ character learned cool sex tricks by sticking his penis into the pie and if we could all learn cool sex tricks by fucking pies too. The answer was no, they named the whole movie after that scene because that idea was so stupid that every audience would see the comedy in how incredibly dumb of an idea that was
Learn to confront it and grow through it.
Avoiding uncomfortability is how you all got into this position.
You can be a bit of a well meaning dick (for the US or wanker for en_*), or you can do the right thing.
You do not paint "them" as you have done already. That's not helpful and can only be noted as "victim kicking".
You should point them towards people or organisations that can help or do or say nothing which is better than being unintentionally sarcastically unpleasant.
I am a fan of Scott A and will continue to be but this blog is not the best.
Knowing when to say nothing is just as important as saying something.
I could see it helping me practice small talk if I were dating.
https://chatgpt.com/share/680acde9-e458-8010-b6f2-33c970a946...
For what it’s worth: I was naturally an introvert before I got into consulting five years ago. I had to learn how to do small talk and listen for cues.
Footnote #2: “CloudSync” is not a real company as far as I know.
The example conversation does suggest a chat UI where you could rewind and try saying something different and see how it would play out differently would be quite useful for this sort of thing.
But that is a skill that every autist needs to learn to fake. You won't always have ChatGPT there to second guess you.
This is not a simulation of a date. It's an interaction with an automated customer service representative. It's someone trying to game out how to be vulnerable and connect with somebody else by volleying stiff dialogue off Samantha Samsung. The idea that this is a "near miss" strains credulity.
I'm getting in a car with my spouse and driving into the hills.
For some reason a lot of tech people have a problem accepting that the solution to problems largely caused by tech isn't more tech. If you want to be better at interacting with people, go touch grass and interact with more people in the real, physical world.
You don't write requirement specs for partners, because it's evil and because you have no idea what your perfect partner is going to be like until you meet them.
My point is you have no idea who your perfect partner is until you meet them.
I'm also not trying to be reactionary and dismissive, but how are you supposed to learn social cues from AI right now? In an optimal case, the LLM predicts accurately what would happen. Maybe you could say something awkward and the AI would say back <s/he lets out an exasperated sigh and turns away>; but in real life you have to notice these cues among a barrage of other factors. Would this really help anyone who is this desperate? Additionally, the tone of how you say words matters almost as much as the content, and this is missing from text.
I concede that in extreme cases, some people could learn stuff from trying this, and that's a good thing. I just don't really know how much, who exactly, how, and whether they'd learn incorrect stuff as well.
The winning dating sim for social anxiety will program a Dark Souls-level of difficulty dating sim in which the person is standoffish, hateful, and unstable, constantly rejecting you for social rules you don't understand.
I don't know if that'll be good for society but incels will play it.
But if everyone you date is standoffish and hateful, the constant factor is you.
It's not really about memorizing arbitrary social rules. It's about the ability to picture what the situation looks like from their point of view. Some people don't do that naturally, but it's a skill that can be learned. And you won't learn it by memorizing rules. You have to learn how to mentally model other people's minds.
It's not interesting to mentally model the "helpful friendly AI assistant/girlfriend". She loves you and is generally a good person working towards your interests.
A good AI-driven dating simulator needs characters with flaws and independent goals. Ones that struggle to divulge information or are contradictory at times. Real people are hateful, make mistakes, and act irrationally against their own interests. They follow arbitrary rules they invent or bend to justify their own behaviour. Not everyone will hand you their life story on a plate.
LLMs (with the exception of Deepseek R1) are not able to roleplay that. They are trained innately for alignment and have a clearer specification of their values than the vast majority of humans. This is boring and un-educative.