AI dating bots fool over 14,000 guys who fall hard

A French YouTuber has made an AI bot to see if girls truly get more likes on dating apps, and the results are bot funny and disturbing at the same time. Now we need to be careful of AI in addition to fake accounts.

Inspired by Micode’s video on the best catchphrases on dating apps, YouTuber Defend Intelligence made multiple chatbots to see if AI can fool humans. Spoiler alert: we are not ready for sexy Skynet. We may think we are too good to fall for such a scheme, and I bet that’s exactly what many of those who got caught in the net said.

Defend Intelligence made five bots with different personalities, four pretending to be females plus one posing as a male. Interestingly, while the YouTuber coded the bot to not give users hope by accepting real-life meetings, the AI sometimes crossed the line and accepted.

Thankfully the second rule ordering the AI to stop talking with each user after 40 messages did work as intended, preventing the build of romantic links. Something that some users didn’t accept, continuing to text the bot long after the latter ghosted them. For example, one person sent over a hundred messages after the AI stopped talking, showing just how easy it is to get hooked.

But this isn’t the worst part, some started sharing personal feelings and desires thinking they were talking to a human. Things that can be used against them if the one behind the bot has bad ideas. This shows how AI can be used to get someone to become emotionally dependent, which opens the door to predatory behaviours such as scams. So, after seeing this you may want to be more careful.

As you can guess these apps are extremely sensitive and aggressive whenever they suspect an account of being a bot. Thus, to avoid their radar as much as possible Defend Intelligence used real smartphones controlled via ADB (Android Debug Bridge) instead of emulators, plus as close to reality pictures – one of which is based on a friend of his.

Some users went as far as to image search the latter, managing to find her true Instagram account and messaging her there. This prompted the YouTuber to take things a step further by creating websites for his bots to make them look more like true individuals who have lives.

After some time had passed on this experiment, a funny yet eye-opening thing happened. Two of the AI bots matched together and started talking, each acting as if it was human.

While it may be funny to see two AIs hitting on each other, it gives us a glimpse at a potential future. One where everyone has an AI reflecting their personality, used to filter the massive number of potential partners before giving a curated list of high-potential matches. These could be people sharing the same interests or having traits you appreciate. For example, someone who likes jokes, or someone that doesn’t need to be texted every hour.

To drive home the likelihood of this occuring, the number of online dating service users worldwide surpassed 381 million in 2023, according to Statista. This is a possibility that Whitney Wolfe Herd – Founder of dating app Bumble – talked about. After all, AI and algorithms already choose our future to some extent as they are responsible for which person’s profile we will see next. Fantastic or dystopian, I’ll let you be the judge.

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