Aleksandr programmed a bot to flirt for him, on Tinder, until meeting, after more than 5,000 profiles, Karina.
Aleksandr Zhadan and Karina Vyalshakaeva have been in a relationship since December 2022. As with many, the meeting took place via Tinder. But there's a twist: Aleksandr initially programmed ChatGPT to flirt for him on the app. This is the story that tells Gizmodo in a post from February 7.
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Aleksandr Zhadan quickly grew tired of Tinder. So, in 2021, he started developing a bot — via an older version of ChatGPT artificial intelligence, GPT-2. All the prompt inserted into ChatGPT aimed for the latter to resemble him as much as possible: his tastes, his centers of interest, his political ideas, and an ability to describe himself. So, ChatGPT swiped for him and then did the conversations for him. In total, 5,239 conversations with women on Tinder were made via this bot — leading to 100 dates.
ChatGPT recommended marriage proposal
As Gizmodo recounts, the bot was initially full of bugs — bugs that made conversations seem weird for the speakers, like when ChatGPT offers to “ go out for a long walk in the forest » (nothing reassuring in this proposition). Another concern: as ChatGPT was linked to his Google Calendar and took the dates for him, there could be a discrepancy between what ChatGPT promised and what Aleksandr knew. For example, the bot had promised to come with flowers and chocolates – the young man came without.
But the bot then improved as OpenAI produced updates up to GPT-4. At the end of 2023, ChatGPT matched with a certain Karina Vyalshakaeva and the conversation lasted several months. Aleksandr and Karina finally met over the course of several dates, and Aleksandr ended up deactivating ChatGPT because the connection was going so well. Or rather to reprogram it: the bot was no longer there to do the conversation for him, but to assist him.
“ At one point, the program wrote to me recommending that I propose to Karina », Explains Aleksandr to Gizmodo, specifying that he had never indicated to ChatGPT the slightest intention of getting married. This would seem to come from an interpretation on the part of the AI: “ Karina told him she wanted to go to a wedding, but ChatGPT thought she would rather attend her own wedding. » Anyway, he took his bot's advice and Karina said yes.
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The couple is now married. But what did Karina think when she learned that she had been talking to a bot for several months? “ He spent a lot of time customizing these prompts, so for me it's nice when it's used rationally. I think the most important thing is our connection in real life, which is great “, she explains. So she wasn't angry when she heard it, just surprised. According to her, the first conversations were like all the others on Tinder — but more effective.
Ethical problems
The story of Aleksandr and Karina certainly has something amusing. But it is not without somewhat more serious implications.
Ethical questions surrounding the use of AI generally converge on the need for transparency: an image or text thus generated must come with a mention of its artificial nature. Clearly, we must know that it is an AI. However, out of the 5,239 conversations carried out by this bot, only one person was aware of having chatted with an AI.
We can reasonably hope that this type of practice does not become widespread — for the good of human relations online. In terms of cost, this seems unlikely in the short term anyway: Gizmodo specifies that this bot actually cost Aleksandr very dear financially. It's numbered in the thousands.
But the problem also works the other way around: more and more people are pointing out the artificial nature of human relationships on an app like Tinder. The “pick-up lines”, the first flirtatious phrases launched after a swipe, are often the same, and the chats sometimes follow one another in parallel, so much so that, in her story, Karina believes she did not have was able to tell the difference between the bot and a usual conversation on the app. Tinder fatigue is a topic all its own.
Furthermore, the use of bots on a dating platform is not without risks either. Fake profiles are already, in themselves, a scourge. But Tinder does not yet ban this type of programs.
