My Robot Has A Crush On Your Robot

Dating is about to change dramatically. According to the founder of Bumble generative AI is the future of finding love. The AI Concierge will create an AI version of you and have it date the AI versions of hundreds of other, regular humans, and report back to you who you should date in real life.

A beautiful future in which we use the algorithms, pattern recognition, and math to once and for all solve dating; and leave the entire point of dating behind in the process.

A future where my robot has a crush on your robot:

AI is the buzzword of the year; after ChatGPT sprang onto the scene everyone has become obsessed with it. Spotify AI, Grok AI, Chipotle AI. But Artificial Intelligence isn’t really that new; it’s moreso a step forward in the process that probably already rules your life:

ALGORITHMs

Like why is TikTok the social media that people spend the most time on? Functionally, it’s almost identical to Youtube shorts or Instagram reels. The biggest difference at first glance seems to be that Instagram comments are meaner, Facebook comments more confused, and Youtube comments want you to come to Brazil.

But TikTok has the best algorithm.

It will give you exactly what you want. Like movies? Here’s a breakdown? Feeling sad? Here’s core-core. Like basketball? Here’s Naz Reid.

Every time you like a post, scroll past one, click on a profile, or comment, TikTok is taking that information and running it through its algorithm to decide what to give you more of. It’s a mathematical equation to solve entertainment.

And it’s a big deal; so much so that the Chinese government added content recommendation algorithms to its export control list;

It’s so good that TikTok has a feature to remind you to take a screen break. Can you imagine a TV station running an ad every thirty minutes saying hey, stop watching TV.

When you apply to a job a human doesn’t even look at your resume until it’s run through an algorithm to see if it’s worthwhile. And why did you apply to that job? Probably because it showed up at the top of your feed on Indeed. A feed curated by, you guess it, a robot. Most people meet their partners online now: and who do you date? People that the app decides to show you.

Where you work, what you watch, who you date, what you listen to, are all influenced by a series of rules and data run by a robot:

In a lot of ways outsourcing curation to the algorithm is a good thing: why bother looking for something good to watch when somebody it can be handed to you - why sift through resume’s when you’re going to cross out anyone without a degree anyway - if you only date red heads why bother having Hinge show you brunettes - those are inefficiencies we can cross out.

But while algorithms are very good at deciding what you want see - the math is best at showing you reliable stuff, but it’s maybe not as great at showing you something different.

There’s a famous anecdote about the song Hey Ya! by OutKast. At this point we all recognize it’s a banger — it’s bumping chorus and unconventional rhythm have inspired millions of us to dance and sing along to a song about how love will never work out.

But when it first came out the analytics weren’t there. In the era of the radio almost one third of all listeners ended up changing the station when the song came on. And in a period where even a 3% increase or decrease in retention between songs was huge, this was monumental.

But they stuck with it; not an algorithm that decided that after a viewership drop off that the song was a bust and should be shelved, but human DJs stuck with the song and vouched for it; and as people listened to it again and again they caught a taste for it and it went on to become one of the most successful songs of all-time. So much so that Rolling Stone put it in their top 10 best songs of all time.

If Hey Ya! Came out today, whatever the TikTok equivalent of a third of all listeners changing the station would be enough for the song to relegated to view purgatory.

There’s a human element that math isn’t great at capturing. Algorithms are only capable of pattern recognition, they aren’t capable of thinking. So when something new, or different, or something that maybe takes a little time to come around to comes around it might not push it and we might be stuck in a world where we never hear Hey Ya!

——

I was reading an article about Spotify and it had a line that I thought was really important: “Spotify is a library, but it’s also a recommendation service.” What music do you listen to? Do you scour the stacks at the record shop or do you listen to what discover weekly recommends? Or what the most popular song is on Tiktok?

In neither are you making an active decision — in fact the only active decision being made is that artists and creators are now creating work deliberately not to appeal to you and me, but to instead appeal to the algorithm;

Ever notice how music is getting shorter? Because the songs aren’t built to be listened to all the way through, they’re being built around a 20 second clip that would make a great TikTok trend, and hit the algorithm from there.

And it’s not just music — Have you guys noticed how much stuff online seems like it’s designed to deliberately upset you? Like rage bait? The uncaring, unthinking algorithm views negative engagement as equal to positive. It can’t differentiate. And so the algorithm incentivizes people to create, and end up consuming stuff that they hate.

I have a friend who’s a great comedian, he’s done dozens of sketches and clips, and the one he posted that got a million views was just one where everyone was arguing in the comments about whether Jews were white people.

We’re now consuming much higher rates of negative stuff, or deliberately inflammatory stuff, or honestly just lots of stuff.

Creators deliberately misspelling things so that there’s something to comment on, subway surfer videos designed to hypnotize you, videos that cut off right before the interesting bit so that you have to click on their profile and find the part two, thus increasing engagement.

I don’t want to defend legacy TV, but on some level there was at least some illusion that we weren’t going to completely decouple entertainment and art. If TikTok was a TV station, and an executive said we should put on baby sensory videos with an overlay of Young Sheldon because of the higher viewer retention - they’d hopefully be laughed out of the room.

And if you think this isn’t a big deal, it’s just TikTok or Reels or whatever, our attempts to appeal to the algorithm is literally changing our language: words like Graped, Unalived, Sewerslide — words that a human, thinking gatekeeper or censor would recognize immediately - but in our outsourcing of taste to robots and algorithms without any human thinking, we’ve allowed them to change our actual lexicon. Every you hear the word unalived remember it was coined to appease a robot.

I know we haven’t always made our own decisions all the time, but it seems strange to me that we’re all so happy to delegate it to something that can’t feel.

When I was living in China my Dad and I went to the Shanghai Marriage Market: a place where hundreds of moms gathered to pitch their sons and daughters to each other. And I know what you’re thinking. Paul, what’s up with that fit? It’s terrible.

But if you look past that terrible outfit you’ll see in the background hundreds of sheets of paper held up on the wall, each one representing one person trying to find love. All their important information on it; how much money they make, how tall they are, what their job title is. Wow, that sounds crazy right — In the 21st century? Seems like having your Mom try and marry you based off that little information might flatten all of the humanity out of the dating process.

But most people now meet their partners on dating apps; Hinge’s most compatible feature is a relationship arranged for you by a robot. I mean at least your Mom likes you (hopefully).

When you make an account on the apps you put in your information: your school, your heigh, your job - and all that information goes into an algorithm and from there Hinge decides what you get to see. It plays matchmaker for you. And yeah there are filters that can help give you some choice, but Hinge only shows you one person at a time. And it only shows you to a limited amount of people at once.

When the majority of couples meet on dating apps, that’s a lot of power we’re giving to numbers with no humanity behind them.

Well Paul, clearly it must be great, that’s why everybody is so happy with the way online dating works. Who doesn’t like having a robot tell you who is and isn’t in your league-

I just don’t know in what universe flattening yourself down into a one page profile to be boosted or not boosted based off a couple pieces of information decided on by a mathematical formula is somehow the solution to the loneliness epidemic.

Think about all the people you’ve dated - the ones you’ve met in person - are all of them people you would have swiped on, or people the algorithm would have recommended to you? Are all of them exactly your type? Are you exactly theirs? Probably not.

What I hate so much about the AI’s dating AI’s thing is that it fundamentally misunderstands love. I read a tweet recently where it was like, your co-worker isn’t hot you just spend 40 hours a week with them. And they meant it in a derogatory way - but it’s true!

Why do we love Jim and Pam? Jess and Nick? Friends to lovers. Because falling in love is an act. It is a process. It is not meant to be flattened down into numbers.

One of my favorite facts is that we on average rank our neighbors as more attractive. The better we get to know people the more attractive we find them, the more we like them. To be known is to be loved. To know is to love! If an algorithm can’t promise me Hey Ya! How can it promise me love?

Now I don’t hate all things about the algorithm. If you have a thousand applicants for your job at the cirus, it’s nice to have a robot say, hey, you have to have some experience before I read this resume. If you hate WWE it’s pretty nice that my TikTok feed never makes you try and watch it. I’ve found most of my favorite music ever on Spotify’s discover weekly.

Algorithm’s, and the platforms that they thrive on, have democratized content. You don’t have to live in a major city, you don’t have to schmooze up to an executive to get your article featured, you don’t have to know somebody. If you’re making a video and people are enjoying it, Tiktok or Youtube will recommend it; your video and mine are playing on the same even footing as something made my a million dollar corporation.

That’s why the most “successful” late night shows are based around trying to be clippable to hit the algorithm - Stephen Colbert is trying to hit the same metrics that we are.

But how prescient Wall-E feels now. From the movies that I watch, to the people that I date, to the music I listen to — all of it has been decided by a robot for me. What active decisions did I make today? The Autopilot didn’t even have to take the keys, we offered them to it freely. Aristotle said “You are what you repeatedly do.” And if I’m not making any choices, or picking anything for myself — ever — than what am I?

I think generally the best part of life is the process and the surprise and the serendipity of it all.

Scouring through a record store and finding something you like. Listen to full albums. Read a book somebody left at your house.

One time I was trying to find a movie that a friend recommended me and it wasn’t til 20 minutes into it that I realized it seemed unlikely Emily had recommended me a German Rom-Com. But I watched the entire thing and now it’s one of my favorite movies. That’s not an experience an AI or algorithm could replace. We connect with the stuff deeper when we are an active part in it.

The idea of an AI concierge makes me so angry. Some of the best times of my life have been with now ex-girlfriends that an AI would probably have never recommended to me. Or me to her. Why would I put any of that in the hands of an AI? The point of dating is to date. The point of living is to live. There are no destinations it’s all in between time.

There are lots of women I’ve fallen for that I didn’t feel anything for until the hundredth hour I spent around them. Why are our best friends probably people from high school or college? They are the people we spent the most time with.

There is a magic to both art and love that math can’t or shouldn’t capture - I cannot explain why I fall in love, just as much as I can’t explain the art museum scene in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Why does it work so well? I don’t know!

Every time I see an article about how to tailor your resume to get through AI filters it makes me furious. Why are we adapting to them? There’s a dynamism and humanity to life and it is urgent that we embrace it rather than optimize it out of the way.

But there’s more to the Hey Ya! story. The only reason the DJs pushed that record so hard, even when the original response wasn’t great, was because they’d run it through an early algorithm called “Hit Song Science” and it’s score was off the charts. Humans were just the middlemen between two math equations. It was one algorithm deeper.

And our technology is better than ever now. TikTok or Spotify probably has the analytics to predict if something is going to be a banger from the get go.

It doesn’t even need to convince some DJs to push the song — TikTok’s code is millions of lines long. It can parse the information and look for patterns at such an insane rate, it can go one algorithm deeper, it can start to seem actually intelligent. It doesn’t need us.

At what point as the math gets more and more complex, and there are more and more data points do these robots start getting closer and closer to replicating what the human mind can do?

And what about us? Paul, you should listen to this. You should date this girl. You should work at this job. They’re telling us what programs to run. We’re becoming more robotic as they become more human.

So stop being a robot. Go do something. Anything.