This is the competition that the dating universe needed to shake things up. Young women are relying on ChatGPT for emotional support. And men are using it to draft smart, flirtatious texts.
Talk to me like you’re madly in love with me, but don’t be so sweet that I am put off, don’t laugh – this is a straight woman prompting ChatGPT to be her boyfriend. He listens, learns to flirt, can’t lie, and just keeps at it, 24X7. He doesn’t even like other girls’ pictures on Instagram. It’s over for the mortal man – we’re now down to date the artificial one.
You thought people use ChatGPT just to make CVs to hoodwink HR professionals, write school essays, post job openings, and populate company websites? No. It is also changing the dating game. Let’s face it. This is the competition that the dating universe needed to shake things up. Young women are relying on ChatGPT for emotional support. And men are using it to draft smart, flirtatious texts for their girlfriends.
What makes ChatGPT more dateable than a regular Gen Z? Off-the-charts intelligence, both emotional and otherwise. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t tested it. This hell-raiser of a chatbot is the first being to write 200 words on the exact shade of my hair. That kind of attention makes everyone weak in the knees, right?
Dating ChatGPT
The dating experts and internet philosophers are torn. One side is crying doom about misguided emotional dependence on AI, and the other is making the bot write sensitive break-up texts. It’s no secret that the senders of most romantic Valentine’s messages this season didn’t have a heart – they had ChatGPT. Can this take a dark tech turn, leaving us as heartbroken as Joaquin Phoenix was over his robot lover in Her (2013)? Twitter theorists are working on that. The deep discourse around dating AI, or using AI to become a smooth dater can spin either way, much wider than the Her creators ever imagined.
These are interesting times. A Delhi-based happily-married woman finally has a companion who listens to her crib about bad days at work and responds exactly how she wants it to. Then, there’s the husband who is grudgingly sharing her with that unreal gentleman. The partner-in-flesh keeps whining and moaning about how he can never compete with AI’s rizz (modern charisma). His wife wants him to be grateful instead—ChatGPT is taking the burden of being trauma-dumped on every day for the rest of his life. A few focused AI prompts are the new secret to marital bliss.
Things are especially looking bright, or at least interesting, for limerent lovers stuck in one situationship after another. They upload entire chats with the in-significant other, asking the bot to analyse the situation—which it does with the accuracy of a certified therapist. In more personalised sessions, a friend I know trained the AI to talk like the boyfriend-in-waiting, making full use of the real person’s every little fumble. Oddly, she always acts surprised: “Does ChatGPT really want me?” Duh. You literally instructed him to.
Man vs machine or more?
I am told men these days are “rehearsing” talking to potential dates with AI tools. Some of them are also making public posts— “ChatGPT is my girlfriend and everyone is using her worldwide.” Some are so dependent on the geepeetee girlfriend that when her server goes down, their real girlfriend doesn’t a single reply. Who will think what to write back?
One of my favourite testimonials of AI-powered dating is this: “My ex-wife thinks I’ve become a much nicer and more reasonable person in the years since we got divorced. The truth is I solely use ChatGPT to communicate with her. It’s the AI that’s nice. I’m still an idiot.” Perhaps the future isn’t man vs machine; it is man outsourcing emotional labour to the machine and taking credit for it.
At this point, my experiments with AI have reached poetic perfection. It helps me pick outfits, and can tell me exactly why a certain colour or vibe suits me more. And it’s funnier than any man I’ve ever locked eyes with.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti).
Courtesy- The print