00:00 Here's your Forbes daily briefing for Thursday, February 15th.
00:05 Today on Forbes, AI found him a date.
00:09 ChatGPT told him to propose. Now they're getting married.
00:14 Well, it's the day after Valentine's Day, but love is really an everyday thing.
00:18 In modern times, for many, that means back to scrolling on dating apps.
00:23 Alexander Zadan, 23-year-old AI product manager who goes by Sasha,
00:28 knew he didn't want to match on Tinder with any women holding flowers in their profile pictures.
00:34 In Russia, where he lives, he thought it was a telltale sign of a big ego,
00:38 akin to the men holding fish photos that have plagued dating apps in the United States.
00:43 He also knew he didn't want to continue conversations with women who were very religious,
00:48 into astrology, or did not work.
00:51 So he built some AI-powered bots to weed them out.
00:55 From his home in Moscow, Zadan told Forbes,
00:58 To cut out some of the time and emotional strain of going on hundreds of dates
01:10 and sifting through thousands of profiles on Tinder,
01:13 he built an autoswiper in 2022 to do some of the work.
01:17 And when ChatGPT was unveiled shortly after,
01:20 he started programming it to chat with his matches.
01:23 Transcripts, screenshots, and data reviewed by Forbes
01:27 show the evolution of Sasha's AI as he improved it over several months.
01:31 In the beginning, the bot was outright bad.
01:34 It didn't sound like him and was missing basic information.
01:38 If GPT said Sasha's dog was in the hospital, and the woman asked "what happened?"
01:42 he was unable to respond in a logical way.
01:45 To improve his Tinder talker, Sasha created a database using human conversations
01:50 that he, not GPT, had previously had on the app,
01:54 including keywords, questions, and answers on topics he often talked about.
01:58 He trained the next iteration of his chatbot on that data,
02:02 and trained his autoswiper, powered by vision model TorchVision,
02:06 to filter out more photos based on his preferences.
02:09 And things did get better, despite the occasional hiccup.
02:12 In one instance, without Sasha knowing,
02:15 GPT accepted a date at the local contemporary multimedia art museum of Moscow.
02:20 When the woman showed up, and Sasha, unaware, did not,
02:23 she messaged him on Tinder to ask if he was still coming.
02:27 The bot responded reassuring her that he was on his way, and apologizing for the delay.
02:32 In December 2022, Sasha's GPT began chatting with a match who lived just outside Moscow,
02:38 Karina Vyalshikhaeva, and they met in person for the first time in January.
02:43 At the time, Sasha opted not to pursue the relationship,
02:46 but a few months later, an improved version of his bot based on GPT-4 resurrected their Tinder chat.
02:53 It wrote, "Hi, we haven't talked in a while. I hope you're doing well.
02:57 I was thinking about our conversations and decided to write. How are you?"
03:02 And that's when the bot and Karina really clicked.
03:06 Karina, who was 22 years old, did not know a bot had slid into her DMs.
03:11 Karina had no idea she'd been algorithmically chosen and conversing with AI
03:15 until more than six months later, in November,
03:18 when she and Sasha were already living together and he broke the news.
03:22 She told Forbes, "I was really shocked, because in that moment I analyzed all the messages in my head.
03:28 Like, when did he answer me, and when did the bot answer me? And what is the difference?"
03:34 AI in dating is not exactly new.
03:36 Some of the most popular dating apps on the market, from Bumble to match groups Hinge and Tinder,
03:41 have long relied on machine learning, both to calibrate possible matches
03:45 and to shield users from unsolicited nude photos, bots, and fraudsters.
03:50 But since the introduction of chat GPT and other generative AI,
03:54 which in the last year have finally made the technology a household name,
03:57 entrepreneurs are finding new ways to apply it to dating,
04:00 and many looking for love are adopting it at a rapid clip.
04:04 Recent months have seen an explosion of everything from bots that'll spit out pickup lines and flirt for you
04:10 to AI editors that'll polish your dating profile
04:13 and photo generators that can turn your bathroom selfies into high-quality headshots.
04:18 All this has some bemoaning the sad, dystopian state of romantic relationships,
04:23 and others are embracing the moment as a transformative one for human connection.
04:27 More than a quarter of young Americans think algorithms can predict whether two people will fall in love,
04:33 according to Pew Data.
04:35 For full coverage, and to see how the bot encouraged Sasha to propose to Karina,
04:39 check out Alexandra S. Levine's piece on Forbes.com.
04:44 This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.
04:49 [music]
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