Trending: Love and deception in the age of AI

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2024

⏱️ 20 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

In a viral thread posted on X in January this year, a 23-year-old Russian man claims he used ChatGPT to filter through and chat thousands of women on Tinder, eventually proposing to one that was selected by the algorithm. The scale and success of his experiment sparked scepticism. Some raised doubts about the technical plausibility of it, while others voiced concerns about the ethical implications of such an endeavour. In an attempt to better understand his experiment, BBC Trending interviewed the Russian man and asked experts what they made of it. As AI becomes more advanced and accessible, the story also highlights broader concerns about the future of this technology in online dating. How will AI reshape the landscape of online dating in the coming years? What biases may be inherent in its algorithms? Is using AI in this manner a form of catfishing?

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Picture this, swiping through profiles on a dating app, hoping to find that special someone.
0:07.0	You get into a conversation, and you really like them, but there is something unsettling. It feels robotic, unnatural.
0:16.3	Now, what if you discovered that the person on the other side of the screen wasn't a person
0:21.1	at all, but a chatbot.
0:24.0	Over the course of a year,
0:28.0	23-year-old Alexander Jadan in Moscow
0:31.0	says he engaged in conversations with over 5,000 women on a dating app
0:36.2	Tinder, all facilitated by the AI chatbot known as ChatGPT.
0:42.0	After months of chatting, he found himself falling for one
0:44.8	particular match. Here's how he described it in a post in Russian on X. I have
0:51.0	proposed a girl with whom chat geeCPK had been communication for me for a year.
0:56.0	To do this, the neural network communicated with 5,239 other girls
1:02.0	whom would eliminate it as unnecessary and left only one.
1:06.0	I'll share how I made such a system what problems there were and what happened to be the other girls.
1:12.0	This is the first post in a long thread. happened to be the other girls.
1:12.8	This is the first post in a long thread that went viral when Alexander posted it in
1:17.1	January this year.
1:19.2	Complete with screenshots and screen recordings, his thread appeared to provide an in-depth look at his methodology,
1:26.3	offering insights into his unconventional quest for love.
1:30.5	But his story raised some questions. Do his claims stack up?
1:35.0	This is the documentary from the BBC World Service.
1:39.0	I'm Olga Robinson with BBC Trending and this is the story of a man who says he proposed to his
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.