The digital Cyrano

How realistic is the idea that an AI-driven “digital intimacy assistant” could help a shy man woo somebody he finds attractive?

By Brad Berens

Recently in my weekly newsletter, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called Flyrt about Chris, a shy man, Roxy, the woman he finds attractive, and Cyr, a snarky, AI-powered “digital intimacy assistant” who coaches Chris in how to woo Roxy.

This time, I’ll explore how realistic the story is or isn’t. You don’t have to read Flyrt (although it ain’t bad) to understand this week’s piece, but fair warning: Thar Be Spoilers Ahead!

Let’s dig in.

The digital Cyrano

Image created using Ideogram.ai.*

For those readers who didn’t clock the parallels, Flyrt parallels the plot of Edmond Rostand’s famous 1897 French play Cyrano de Bergerac, which I read in the delightful Brian Hooker translation as a boy. (You can see José Ferrer perform this translation on YouTube in the 1950 film; there are many other adaptions, of which the 1987 Steve Martin movie Roxanne is my favorite.)

In the play, Cyrano is a military man with a huge nose who loves Roxane, but Roxanne loves Christian, who is handsome and tongue-tied. Cyrano helps Christian woo Roxane both because her happiness is important to him and because he thinks she could never accept him as a lover with his humungous honker.

In Flyrt, Christian becomes Chris, Roxane become Roxy, Cyrano becomes the snarky AI Cyr, and Cyrano’s best friend Le Bret becomes Chris’s pal Brett. The parallels are superficial because Cyr the AI does not love Roxy, but they were a hint to the recovering English majors who read these columns.

What is realistic? A lot. An August 30 Financial Times ($) story—“Dating apps develop AI ‘wingmen’ to generate better chat-up lines: Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr are racing to create chatbots that can coach Gen Z users to flirt”—was my direct inspiration.

Here’s a chunk of the FT article:

“AI is going to help people make better connections,” Grindr chief product officer AJ Balance told the Financial Times. “It’s that friend in the bar who’s helping you to ask someone out—but in the virtual context.”

This industry pivot towards AI-powered relationship advice and coaching comes as so-called dating app fatigue, particularly among younger users, continues to plague the online matchmaking market.

Online dating groups are betting that personalized feedback and advice from AI chatbots will bring disappointed daters back to their products.

Balance said Grindr’s chatbot assistant, called the Grindr Wingman, would fend off burnout by helping users overcome the “biggest pain points” of online dating, including by generating conversation prompts based on users’ unique profiles and chat histories.

Speaking personally, Tinder already feels like cheating: you know that a person is open to a conversation because both of you swiped right. (Other dating apps have similar mutual interest disclosing features.) When I met La Profesora, I had to walk up to her and introduce myself using my mouth, eye contact, and without anybody whispering first draft opening line suggestions in my ear.

It worked out.

Back to FT:

He added AI could ultimately eliminate the hard work of online dating: “The idea of a wingman talking to someone else’s wingman, maybe to see what it’d be like to go on a date or to find common areas of interest, is something that’s worth exploring,” he said.

I nearly did a spit take with my morning coffee when I read that paragraph. Even if both wingman algorithms were many times more sophisticated than what we have today, humans are such messy bags of overlapping and conflicting identity frames that I have deep skepticism that — by the time both AIs figured out two people kinda like ice skating and got them to the rink — both would be ready to slip on their skates and have a good time.

Richard Jeni’s old quip, “Imposters, party of two!” about people dressing up for first dates, comes to mind.

But the point with regard to Flyrt is that online dating companies are already deploying Generative AI algorithms to scour user profiles in order to personalize specific dating advice for the people who want to court them. That part of the story is realistic… and creepy.

The unrealistic aspects of the story, or at least unrealistic right now, include things like:

  • Cyr riding along in Chris’s ear, whispering advice in real time. However, if you’ve spent time playing with the voice-interface version of ChatGPT, then you’ve already experienced how uncannily human AI can seem.
  • Chris and Cyr watching two different adaptations of Austen’s Persuasion together so that Chris will have things to say when he talks with Roxy. However, one of the promises of GenAI is personalized, real-time digital teachers that spend a lot of time with human students, of which this is a version.
  • Cyr’s snarky personality, where the AI calls Chris “dummy” and acts like a PG-13 version of a Disney sidekick character (Jiminy Cricket, the Genie). However, that’s just programming. The earnest, not witty personality of ChatGPT’s voice interface is a coding choice that OpenAI has made in order not to freak out users. There are plenty of digital companions on the market with loads of personality, which you can see in this May NYT ($) article by Kevin Roose.
  • Flyrt, then, is realistic, albeit near future.

It’s also yet another challenge to our ability to know what is real.
__________

 

Brad Berens is the Center’s strategic advisor and a senior research fellow. He is principal at Big Digital Idea Consulting. You can learn more about Brad at www.bradberens.com, follow him on Blue Sky and/or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his weekly newsletter (only some of his columns are syndicated here).

 

 

* Image prompt: “a photo of a young Caucasian man’s ear. Hovering next to the ear, a ghost-like, white, translucent version of Cyrano de Bergerac with a huge nose is whispering into the ear. Cyrano is wearing black and white 1800s French military attire, including a hat with a long white plume.”

 

See all columns from the Center.

September 12, 2024