Endless Thread - Good Bot, Bad Bot | Part V: Dating Bots

Episode Date: December 9, 2022

If you've ever used a dating app, chances are you've encountered a bot, most likely a fake account or a scammer. But this week on Endless Thread, we investigate a new type of bot that is helping users optimize their love lives — a digital dating coach installed in your phone's keyboard that always knows just what to say. ****** Credits: This episode was written and produced by Nora Saks. Mixing and sound design by Emily Jankowski and Paul Vaitkus. Ben Brock Johnson and Nora Saks are the co-hosts.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Merotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? And, of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts.

WBUR Podcasts, Boston. So this was on Tinder. So this is my friend Julia. I'm Julia. I'm 32 years old. Single. And, yeah, we live in the Northeast. I live in Portland, Maine.

Julia has been on and off dating apps for the last five years. in and out of relationships and situationships. One of our favorite hobbies is dissecting her online dating adventures and misadventures in a little city that can feel much more like a small town, especially when it comes to love. But back in March, Julia was on Tinder, swiping left, swiping right, when? I came across a profile, this person only had two photos, but it's, you know, you can see an attractive man. I can confirm a very attractive man, where, a blue t-shirt, perfectly quaffed hair and beard, toothy smile. You know the one. His photos looked

professional, maybe even a little staged. They look like they could be on a bios page on a tech startup website. Name, Aiden, age 30, location 10 miles away. And then the bio, which on Tinder is called About Me, just says, never know what to say on these. Nothing else. Not much to go on. It's true. But he's cute. So she swipes right.

They match. And instantly, this hunk Aiden sends her a message. It says, And I quote, God damn, you are beautiful. No punctuation. And damn spelled like a beaver dam. Damn.

Yeah. Okay. And what did you respond? What did you think? re-flattered. What happened? No, I didn't respond. I wasn't particularly flattered. I think this is like a really empty,

vacuous sort of message. What am I supposed to say? Like, I agree. Thank you. And like so many Tinder matches that lose their spark before they can ever catch fire, that was the beginning and the end of Julia and her future manchop, Hayden. She didn't think much of it, of him really,

until... A few days later, I think about like five days later, I was scrolling Instagram and saw a new post from the website Reductress.com. Reductress is basically like The Onion, but for feminists. There's lots of fake articles and satirical headlines. And she stumbles across a post titled, How to Get Him As Hard as Hard as a Box of Domino Brown Sugar. Because that stuff is impossible to break. It's very hard, yeah, yeah. And beneath it is like a split screen photo. of a box of domino brown sugar

and then the same picture of Aiden that stock photo of the guy that messaged me or the person, the thing that messaged me, God damn, you are beautiful. And yeah, I thought that was really, really, really funny. Hilarious, really, because Tinder Aiden, age 30, 10 miles away, was hot all right, and he was also most likely a bot all right.

I know, I know the word bot gets thrown around a lot. Most people use it as kind of a catch-all term to describe the countless chatbots and fake accounts that haunt popular dating apps like Tinder or Hinge or Bumble, you name it, and that scam unsuspecting victims with all kinds of rom-cons. According to the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that protects consumers, in the last five years, people have reported losing more than $1 billion to romance scams. That is more than any other fraud category the FTC tracks. And there are countless how-to articles.

How to spot a fake dating profile. How to avoid getting catfished or money muled. Now, we can't know for sure if Aiden truly was a bot or a scammer or what his or its intentions really were because luckily, Julia didn't take that bait and go on that date. Maybe I think there was a little bit of me that felt sort of proud of myself that I did, like, I wasn't, I don't know, susceptible to that lame and fake of a message that I was able to kind of sniff it out and just be like, yeah,

no, I'm not going to respond to that. So we all know there are lots of fake accounts interacting with real people on dating apps. But what Julia and most of the other savvy online daters we spoke with didn't seem to be aware of is that there's a whole other kind of bot slinking its way into our love lives. A new family of Bot, a family that I like to think of as an AI Cyrano de Bergerac. Ah, yes, Serino. The classic story of that ugly guy who wrote love letters to his beautiful lady cousin on behalf of that other guy, the gorgeous one, who is horrible at speaking. And if I remember correctly, they were both in love with the cousin because it was like 17th century France or something.

Of course. Yeah, and that story, it doesn't work out well for anyone. But instead of penning romantic letters with a quill by candlelight and then getting into sword fights, this new kind of bot lives in your smartphone's keyboard. And it can ghostwrite banter with all your e-crushes 24-7, anticipating and automating the language of love. I am a poet. My words upon your lips. I'm Ben. Never know what to say on these, Johnson.

I'm Nora. God damn, you're beautiful, Sacks. And you're listening to Endless Thread. coming at you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. Next up in our series, Good Bot, Bad Bot, Serino de Bottraq. Okay, so we're on Tinder, and what are we seeing here? We're looking at a list of matches. And this is from an account you created, I'm assuming.

Correct. This is from an account I created. Allow me to show you the profile. Here's rock climbing, then a puppy. than more pictures in front of the ocean. But that's not actually you. That's not actually me. So this is our 35 millennial demographic user. That actually is Taylor Margo.

He is actually 35. And he is actually giving us a virtual tour of a new app he created called Keys AI. I'm Taylor Margo. I'm the CEO of Keys, and I'm in Missoula, Montana. Keyes is an AI coach for dating and relationships, an intent-based communication assistant, a wingman for life, according to Taylor. The product works this way. Say you match with someone on a dating app and you want to break the ice, but aren't sure how.

Keys can suggest personalized openers to get the conversation started and banter to keep it going. In this instance, Keys generated and Taylor sent this one. What's something that no one's complimented you on before? that you wish somebody would. Now, Cheyenne, his match, responds, LOL, I like the question, but would never ask for a compliment. You could, what's common, is sit here and rack your brain

and spend a whole ton of effort and second-guess yourself constantly. Or you can reach her... Taylor screenshots the combo, opens Keys, which is like a keyboard layer. Keys analyzes it, generates more suggestions on what to say next. Okay, it says optimizing. responses. What do we got now? All right. We got, well, I think you're very beautiful, and I'm sure there are plenty of

things people haven't said to you that you wish they would. For example, I bet you have a great sense of humor that not many people get to see. That is amazing. So we're going to, we're going to send that one. The next one, too. The whole point of keys, Taylor says, is to help you keep the conversation going long enough to get the outcome you want, which is probably a date. What we really do is help people build connection. That's a total goal. It's not about making people and the better communicators.

It's about making them better connectors. Building connection is something that's really important to Taylor. He might live in big sky country now, but he's from Silicon Valley. And in his youth, he was living his dream, working at a big fancy law firm in the Bay Area, giving advice to all these tech pioneers and dating. I was on the dating apps for the better part of a decade, the better part of my 20s. For the record, Taylor is married now and has a very young newborn baby. He met his wife, not online, but IRL, at a climbing gym in San Francisco.

I am also married, and I met my wife in narrative nonfiction, my senior year of college. I've never been on the apps. Well, I guess while we're at it, I have done time in the apps, but I'm, I'm not up. That's what it feels like. Was it hard time? It sounds like it was hard time. It was very hard time.

That's part of why I'm not on them anymore. And frankly, I really hope never to return. But Taylor clearly remembers all those years he was single. And the dating apps as the source of loneliness that really in a lot of ways became a personal epidemic and woe about throughout my life. Work was an antidote. He loved connecting with his clients, building relationships, building relationships. relationships, trying to solve their problems. But a few years ago, he had a crisis of faith.

One very bad day, when it became painfully clear that his mentors at the law firm, these people he looked up to, even wanted to be someday. Didn't value communication and connection the way I did and kind of thought it was like almost unnecessary, just like a commodity. So Taylor quits his job, sends $20,000 to Ukraine, gets back a long string of code, which, after some trial and error, becomes the product and the startup we see here today. Keys can do more than just analyzing screenshots of your conversations. It can also generate messages based on your intent.

During our product demo, Jessica's profile pops up. It says, Together we could cook dinner and listen to vinyls while accidentally drinking too much wine. Now all we have to do is select an intent. On the keyboard, there are dozens to choose from, like amusing, sweet, curious, romantic, goofball, and even travel, dog, nature. I requested flirty. Flirty, my friends, keep telling me there's someone I should get to know on this app. They may be right about you.

You seem like your high maintenance but low maintenance at the same time. Any better? No, thank you. That's an insult, not flirty. I'm not sure. There's another one. I'm not sure if you're flirting with me, but you're flirting with me. I don't get any of these.

Do you get them? I do get them. I think you need to spend more time on dating apps, nor. Keys is built on OpenAI's GPT3 technology, which Taylor tells me, is basically a platform layer. Now, after all this, I still have no idea what that means. But I do know that it's the same technology behind a lot of the bots we've explored in this series. Yeah, and they're all generative AI, which is basically

a class of artificial intelligence that uses, quote, unsupervised learning algorithms to create its own new content, images, video, audio, code, text. In this case, flirty messages, pick up lines, and probing questions. But a bot isn't born knowing how to chat

or flirt. You have to teach it. You have to give it a data set to learn from. And Taylor says by now, almost one year from launch, Keyes currently has around 15,000 monthly active users, and on average, those users send four to eight AI-generated messages per conversation, romantic or not, which adds up to about one million touch points per month. Every time people interact with the product, every time people take screenshots, we're learning about how they communicate, what their likes and dislikes are. But if you trace the algorithm all the way back, it's just a bunch of homecrafted. messages by Taylor and some other dating professionals.

So Taylor and his team, plus all 15,000 or so Keyes users, are constantly training the algorithm. And in turn, the AI is coaching them on how to level up their dating game. Or a conversation game in general, because you can also use Keys for non-romance purposes in iMessage or wherever you text. But as we witnessed in real time during Taylor's Keys demo, Keys, Keys, research, and development involves real people, real humans looking for love, connection, or some... You know what I mean? I have fake accounts on basically every dating app out there.

And that's a necessary step in product development if we're going to build the product that really delivers results. We eat our own dog food. So I have... Yes, I have a variety of genders, ages, you name it, we have it. Wow, that's tricky, right? Like, first I was going to ask, how does your wife feel about that? But now I'm like, oh, this is a whole other kind of level of kind of ethical challenge, right? How do you think of that piece of it?

Like, are there people out there kind of wasting their time interacting with your accounts in order to help you build a better product? wasting time. That's an interesting way to put it. From our standpoint, and I hope that this is how it comes across, is having a thoughtful conversation that isn't harmful, isn't hurtful, doesn't ever put them down, if anything, asks them questions about themselves that maybe they haven't been asked before or had the opportunity to see in somebody else. Maybe they learn something about the person that they really are looking for or how they want to find somebody that does communicate. No, I get that. I guess like if it were me, I would be kind of pissed if I was like, if I went down the road and had like this really long like successfully connecting conversation with

what I thought was a person. And then they ended up being like just a research for a product if that makes sense. Well, you know, you're actually, you're you're breaking my brain here because on a matter of scale, the number of conversations we have versus the number of conversations an individual on a dating app has is pretty insignificant. But from a moral perspective, I'm not sure that matters. And I think it would be a worthwhile thing for us to explore that when we do have these conversations where we are developing the product, that we conclude those conversations with like a tell-all, like an FYI.

Like, you deserve to know that this is part of the product development process for Keys and that you are an unwilling participant. And if there's any feedback you have, we'd love to hear it. What does Maxine your wife think about this venture and that, like, that you're spending a lot of time on apps interacting with profiles? My wife loves Keys, loves using it with her own mom. overtaxed who lives in New York and hates that I have fake profiles on dating apps. So the R&D is one of the ethical quandaries we stumbled upon during our interview with Taylor. But there's another one that Drew, a dating consultant for men, landed on when reviewing Keyes AI on TikTok. I think this could really waste women's time and just get them out on dates with guys that they think are witty and funny and clever, but they're actually not.

They were just using this bot to do the talking. but I also think it could maybe help guys. So I don't know. More on the pros and cons and cringes to having your own personal 21st century AI Serenot de Bottarak in your pocket at your beck and call in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science,

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If you were going to put like one snazzy little bio that like captures you right now. Yeah. What would it be? That is such a great question, especially because I feel like part of me thinks it would be so funny to put like, I am a dating app researcher and to see what people would say because I think that would be. Right? Such a hook, but also maybe scary to some people. Like, I could see them be like, oh. This is Dr. Katie Caduto, a professor of media science in Boston University's College of Communication.

And yes, a dating app researcher. I think you told me on the phone that are you engaged? I am. Okay, and how did you meet your partner? Not on a dating app. We met because we worked together while I was in grad school. I bartended on the side, and so we met very organically without ever having a dating app involved. And do you use dating apps for any reason?

No. In spite of the way she met her fiancé, Katie is an expert in online dating. Well, an academic expert, at least. Dr. Caduto. I love the titles of your research papers. Thank you. Swiping for trouble problematic dating application use among psychosocially distraught individuals and the paths to negative outcomes. Wow.

And then also online daters sexually explicit media consumption and imagined interactions. Yeah, let's just talk about all that stuff. Katie told us she got initially interested in online. online dating because her friends were constantly on the apps, not finding success, and yet they just kept coming back for more. And she wanted to understand why. And while she might not use them herself, between the broad surveys and in-depth interviews she conducts, Katie estimates that in the six years she has been studying the habits, behaviors, and experiences of online daters, she has researched over 1,000 individuals. When we say the words,

Tinder bot or bots and dating apps, what does that make you think of? Yeah, so the first thing I think of are fake profiles, you know, someone who's not who they say they are. Most of her research subjects report having run into at least a handful. But get this. The week we contacted Katie for an interview was the very same week a student told her about this other breed of bot, the kind that can ghostwrite your messages for you, which at first didn't sit well. your ideal partner is someone who knows how to communicate with you. And if you can't write a message to them or if you're relying on a third party to write messages that are going to build the relationship,

I think once you meet in person, every illusion is going to fall apart. Like I keep thinking about the person who's receiving these kind of pre-written messages. And what happens when they figure that out? Because I feel like there's going to be a point where you figure it out. Katie says in general she wants app users to find whatever it is they're looking for. If that's just a casual hookup, Katie says she could see how an AI helper could be handy. But I also think part of the whole appeal of dating apps for relationship purposes is meeting that real person and finding that real connection. And so me personally, I think having any kind of AI, you know, it kind of cheapens that experience.

Some Keys users would beg to differ, at least in their Apple app reviews. A perfect wingman. Have you ever seen the movie Hitch with Will Smith? This app is the virtual manifestation of that. This app takes out a lot of the guesswork and time crafting messages. This is probably the future. When used properly, it's so easy to book dates. It's ridiculous.

Taylor Margo, the CEO of Keys A.I, told us that they've received buckets of anecdotes and positive user reviews like this. Now, when it comes to the date success rate, the company doesn't really track that for privacy reasons. What is clear is that the longer someone uses keys to communicate, the more they use it, which is a win for the startup. Okay, that's how some users feel, but what about the people it's used on? We have lots of examples of users telling us stories about going on first dates where they reveal keys, and then the person at first is outraged, then says, wait a second, show me it, and then they go download it.

In the video you're about to hear, two people are on a real first date. date. There's also a dog running around the background. And the guy has just disclosed to his date that he used keys to message with her. And he's explaining how the bot works. That's exactly what you sent me. Shut up. This right here? That line? Yes. Show me in your phone. Oh, my God. Here we are.

Holy shit. Oh, my mom. This is disgusting. I somehow doubt that that woman was converted into a woman. a Keys customer? I agree, but at least that guy did eventually reveal to her that he had used AI. But there's no guarantee that someone would reveal that. A swath of our users are not comfortable sharing that they're using keys with their dates. And I want to change that. I want keys to be something that you are proud to share with whoever you're dating the day you start talking to them

because it shows that you care about how you communicate and you want to be a better communicator. You are doing work on yourself to be more authentic, to be more curious, to be more empathetic. And if you need a coach to do that, I'm willing to share it. And not only that, will you use it with me because I think we'll have a better conversation and get to know each other better.

Taylor makes a strong case. But Ben was still stuck on the idea that thanks to a silver-tonged bot, But keys users are misrepresenting who they are, at least initially. You know, I keep going back to the Cyrano de Bergerac story, I guess, when I'm thinking about keys. And this idea that, you know, you've got a coach, but that coach in some ways is putting words in your mouth. Taylor, however, saw it in a different light. By giving people an example of how to do things differently, a different way to communicate, a better way to communicate,

We're teaching them phrases and poshers and intents and methods and tools that they can use in their own lives. Now, when the rubber meets the road and they show up on that date and maybe they're not the same communicator a la Sehernaud Diversaract, I think that's a great outcome. I think it's a fantastic outcome. I think it's the right outcome maybe if those people don't gel yet because they aren't gelling in person. but what needed to happen was to get those people to in person. Taylor is pretty starry-eyed about the power of generative AI. And as the founder and face of an AI startup, that's his job.

It's his bottom line. But as we continued to probe the proliferation of AI dating coaches and what it means for modern love with Professor Katie Caduto, she started to come around and actually so did Ben. I guess I'm like now thinking about it in a different way, right? which is sort of like we actually all kind of suck at this. And where we're trying to get is in person. Like we're trying to get that date.

And so like for me, it's like if in the path of getting to see if we actually have real chemistry, like you employ the help of a machine to make sure that you don't suck at, like I would not want people to judge my communication abilities by my electronic interactions. me. Katie agreed that it was important to examine both sides. Sure, she could easily imagine many folks she'd interviewed who would not have appreciated being on the receiving end of a match using AI to boost their text game. But there were many others she had studied who might really benefit from an aid-like keys. I do think that could be great for someone with social anxiety who, you know, it's not to say they are a terrible communicator, especially in person, but maybe having something that can help you think through, well, what do I say or what's the best way to say

this, I could see that for that particular group being extremely useful. I think a lot of it comes down to if you ever reveal that you're using this kind of tool to a partner or not. That's what I keep thinking about is, do you reveal that? And if you do, how do you do it and when do you do it? Katie predicts that AI is only going to become more integrated in our love lives and in our lives. So it needs to become part of that process of what information you choose to disclose to your partner and when. You know, and if you can tell a partner that you're socially anxious, right, or you have these kind of discomforts. Which you should eventually. Exactly.

Exactly. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. It's like so critical, right, for achieving intimacy and kind of having that openness of communication. Yeah. So if you're going to do that to be able to then say, just so you know, like I have this and this tool helped me, I don't think that that's maybe going to be. to be the end of the world.

Keys AI is just one of many bots serving up anticipatory or augmented communication. Companies like mine, there's a lot of them right now, all using generative AI in ways that is going to lower the difficulty level of everyday communications. We're doing it in dating. Keys AI is funded by venture capital. And according to their website, a few angel investors too, including Olympic speed skater Apollo oh no. We've raised $3 million to date and are getting ready for probably talking to some more poke here soon. Keys is in that interesting startup zone where it has clearly and successfully

identified a need in the marketplace, the meat marketplace, but at the same time, dating apps are already starting to do auto-complete text suggestions for their users. My theory is that huge companies like Match Group, which, by the way, owns Tinder. hinge, OKCupid, Match.com, and others, we'll try to scoop up these kinds of startups and AI products and just incorporate them right into the dating app. So it just becomes normalized. Taylor sees his company's real competitors,

not as the dating app behemists that might try to swallow him up, but as the huge mindfulness and therapy apps that coach customers on how to also have better connections and more fulfilling relationships, like BetterHelp and Talkspace. Talk space. Therapy for all. They're just doing it with real humans, and we're going to use an AI to scale it to every person in the world. Really the AI coach for every relationship in the world. A lot has changed since Match.com, the first online dating site, came on the scene in 1995.

Back then, lots of people thought online dating was creepy. Now, almost three decades later, online dating is a multi-billion-billion. industry. It's the most popular way to meet someone. So where's all this headed? What even is love and dating now that we have AI, CERNOS, whispering sweet nothings into our keyboard? If you ask Taylor, we're all marching towards a frontier full of assisted augmented communication, where the lines are going to blur even further and faster. I see a heading in a direction where we have, it's going to sound a little metaversy, but profiles of ourselves that do a lot of interacting on behalf of each other

sort of wandering. And then once things reach a certain point, bubble up to the surface. Like once you're bots are vibing, you just get a little notification that says, all right, now it's time to meet in person. I don't love that future. I really don't. I prefer something where we are today in the middle, which is sort of like autopilot in a Tesla. where you're sitting in the driver's seat

and your hands aren't on the wheel, but you're there and you're the human in the loop. I mean, autopilot in Tesla's has not worked out all that well. So I'm still worried that if all of this keeps up, we're going to get to this place where everyone is just, you know, leaning so hard on the bots. And, you know, the end result is fewer and fewer humans actually interacting with each other.

I feel like it's just going to be. haptic sex suits. And people are just going to like match. You're going to match with someone. And then you're not even going to go and meet them. You're just going to have, you're going to be in your haptic suit. And you'll engage with each other and make out with each other that way. And that's what I think it's going to be. I honestly, people are like, nobody's going to leave their house anymore. And this is my terrible boring dystopia. Yeah, that would really escalate. For the record, I did Google haptic suit. And they're just those full-body VR onesies, you know, with the headset and all the sensors all over your body.

Ben, you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I do. As for Ben's deep, terrible, dark dystopia, Professor Katie Caduto wasn't really totally buying into it. There are so many people who, you know, despite all the other things they use their phones for, their computers for, I will still get people in surveys who are like, I can't believe that anyone would ever use this, right? So I think you'll still have that group of holdouts who won't use dating apps much less haptic sex suits. Remember Julia, our friend and real live human online dater? Julia of Julia and... God damn, you are beautiful.

Aiden? Well, when I talked to her about this kind of dating bot, not the Aidan kind, but the AI dating coach Serenok kind, she was surprisingly, some might say alarmingly, sanguine. Maybe we are in a direction of, like, technology. We'll just sort of figure this out for us. And, you know, that could be good. Certainly, I guess, would save me some time and headache. But I don't know.

Julia says if she ever did find out that a prospective date had used an AI coach, like he is in the process, it wouldn't be an automatic deal breaker. The bigger issue she encounters on the dating apps right now is that people just want to be pen pals and only talk online. I would rather somebody match with me using AI and then talk with me as themselves and then meet with me in person, then match with me as themselves and talk to me as themselves in perpetuity over the app and never, ever ask me out. So this whole new generation of dating bot is using and deploying artificial intelligence to help us humans get out of our own way, improve our batting average, so to speak, at least in the game of love. And make no mistake, it is a game. But what about the bots that are actually just like us,

that think and act human? Could you tell the difference? There's a guy in there with a robot that's taking sodas out of a refrigerator. I just saw that. That's all next week in the final episode of our series, Good Bot, Bad Bot. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR in Boston. Do you want to see photos of Tinderbot Man Chop Aden? You can find it, among many other things, at WBUR.org, slash endless thread.

This episode was written, reported, and produced by me, Norris Sacks. With a little help from me, Ben Brock Johnson. A lot of help. Our very own Cyrano here. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankeowski and Paul Vikis. Our web producer is Megan Cattel. And the rest of our team is Amri Siebertson, Dean Russell, Quincy Walters, Grace Tatter and Matt Reed.

Endless Thread is a show about the blurred lines between digital communities in a haptic sex suit. It always is. If you've got an untold history, an unsolved mystery, or a wild story from the internet that you want us to tell, hit us up, why don't you? Email Endlessthread at wbur.org. Thanks for listening.