Ask HN: Would you allow an AI to go on most of your dates for you?

Dating is expensive, time-consuming, and often… exhausting. What if there were a way to test compatibility before even leaving your couch?

Here’s the idea:

* Your personal AI chatbot learns your personality from your social media writing.

* Instead of going on every date in real life, your chatbot "goes on dates" with other users' chatbots.

* Chats that go well in these AI simulations are then escalated to actual humans, so you only meet people with real potential.

* Basically, AI-simulated conversations filter out the bad dates so you can focus on the good ones — saving time, money, and awkward conversations.

Would you try a service like this?

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JohnFen 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, for two reasons.

First, I don't think there is any technology that could learn my tastes and personality to any degree of accuracy, and particularly not if the only training material was social media. Likewise, I don't think that I could tell compatibility by interacting with someone else's AI.

Second, dating is not just about testing compatibility. It's also fun in its own right, and offers practice in social interaction (amongst a host of other things). Even if AI were able to accurately determine compatibility, limiting your dating experience to just those people means you are losing out on exercising and developing important social skills and perhaps inhibiting personal growth. Without growth and experience, you'll never expand the range of who you are compatible with and your social experiences will remain fixed to a smaller world.

Bad dates, as unpleasant as they may be in the moment, bring their own value to you and offer opportunities for personal growth.

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amichail 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Just to clarify, the idea is to have two AIs go on a date with each other. Humans would not be going on dates with AIs.

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JohnFen 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, I understand. Even if that could give any real insight (and I don't think it could), I think it would have negative value overall.

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amichail 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The chats from AI dates would provide more transparency than today's algorithmic matching.

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schoen 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Do you have data, or a theory, about why they would produce more statistically valid estimates of people's romantic compatibility than prior algorithmic matching methods?

I agree that they do better on explainability issues in the sense that people could read the transcripts and say "oh yeah, I would/wouldn't have liked/enjoyed that", which they can't do if the OKCupid algorithm says they're a 92% match with someone or something. But how do we know that chatbots can be made a realistic enough simulation of a person to give relevant (indeed, more relevant) guesses about romantic potential compared to older matching methods?

Remember that existing LLMs have a whole lot of training that's not based on specific individuals at all, so to start with you have some component of "to what extent do chatbots that are told to simulate a conversation in a date end up acting like they liked other conversation partners?" with potentially a smaller component of distinctiveness of an individual.

(Another issue is that chatbots wouldn't know private or personal information that hadn't been revealed in training data but that might conceivably come up, if relevant, during a real date!)

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amichail 2 hours ago | parent [-]

You would have to try it and see how it compares with algorithmic matching.

But note:

* AI dating would you allow you to "go" on many more dates than you could otherwise.

* There's a novelty factor to this that would make a lot of people want to try it.

	▲	Xx_crazy420_xX 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Why you assume it will provide more opportunities than 'random' selection? I think it will be opposite

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JohnFen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Transparency into what, though? The transcripts would give you transparency into what the bots said, but not transparency into the people.

Comparing to other algorithmic matching isn't that useful, because it's all terrible. But I don't see how this method would be an improvement.

	▲	amichail 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		With AI dating, you can inspect the chat to see why it was escalated to you. You could also inspect the chats of failed dates to see what happened.

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lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What exactly do you mean by this? In particular, how does the lack of transparency manifest in today's matching and how would the chat content fix that?

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amichail 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Don't today's online dating sites keep their matching algorithms secret?

At least with AI dating, you can inspect the chat to see why it was escalated to you. You could also inspect the chats of failed dates to see what happened.

	▲	lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> keep their matching algorithms secret Right. I mean that you could just do what they do but don't keep it secret.

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leakycap 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Absolutely not & would be concerned about the stability/goals of anyone who outsourced their dating life & human connection to a machine.

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wryoak 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Just the opposite. The good dates I’ve had are treasured memories, but the bad dates taught me about who I am. I wish I’d dated less selectively while I was in the dating pool, to achieve more self awareness.

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amichail 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Wouldn't that be rude though... dating people just to learn more about yourself?

	▲	lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> just to learn more about yourself This is not why they dated. They dated to test compatibility and learning about themself was a byproduct.

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pnw_throwaway 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This might be the most autistic thing I’ve read all week…

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bradac56 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

No, and thankfully that is not something LLM's can do.

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eschneider 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

What is wrong with people?