12 February 22 - 28, 2024 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Bot and Heavy Inside the very real new world of AI dating. BY AVA THOMPSON A man returns home to silence after a dull day at work, dumps a sad can of slop on the stove and spends 20 min- utes trying to decide which show will be most bearable to watch alone. No one is there to make suggestions or fight over the remote. Then a flirty text lights up his screen and his brain’s amygdala. The sender is a gorgeous hybrid of model Miranda Kerr and movie star Ana de Armas. And, miraculously, she’s interested in the dreary details of his day. Of course, she was carefully designed to look and act like an ideal love interest and chosen by this man to be his virtual companion. At long last, the man and his lady love are alone together to chat freely without judgment — if togetherness can be achieved between a human and an algorithm. This is neither a scene out of a Black Mirror episode nor one from Spike Jonze’s Joaquin Phoenix-AI modem romance Her. It’s the real- ity for countless people who combat loneliness by turning to AI relationships, AI models and other avatar-assisted illusions of connectivity. In a recent report on loneliness, which CNN dubbed the “loneliness epidemic,” a global survey found that 1 in 4 people experi- ences intense loneliness. Chronic loneliness and isolation have greater repercussions on our well-being beyond boredom and unsatis- fying sex lives: They also increase health risks, including premature death. So who can blame those hopeful roman- tics — who, perhaps, have exhausted dating apps through endless scrolling — for looking to modern technology to update their sense of happiness through a bit of tech trickery? Human dating is hard enough and is filled with uncertainty (as a pre-Tinder Sex and The City surely taught us). But there is one thing we can say for sure: Like most of our socializa- tion, dating is becoming an increasingly virtual activity. So in the words of Carrie Bradshaw, we couldn’t help but wonder: Are blue light glasses the newest form of protection? Are in- person relationships becoming more like promise rings — an artifact of a bygone era? While singles (plus polis and naughty marrieds) continue to flood online dating platforms, user experience is mixed. Tik- Tokers are adamant that Dallas, in particu- lar, is nothing but a “dating dumpster.” A Pew Research poll found that almost one third of U.S. adults have used a dating platform. Most users had a positive experience, but the poll also showed that younger women tended to have less positive experiences because of harassment and unsolicited explicit messages. Global tech company Social Discovery Group thinks online dating apps are key in preventing that loneliness. A report by the company found that 67% of its users turned to online dating platforms and AI for roman- tic relationships and to decrease loneliness. And the time spent on these apps also in- creased by 35% from 2022 to 2023. The company encompasses over 40 brands, which includes a handful of dating apps. The group’s EVA AI, an AI “soulmate” chatbot, provides a prime example amid this virtual romance trend. “Humans sometimes forget things. EVA doesn’t forget anything,” says KJ Dhaliwal, the chief strategy officer at Social Discovery Group. Dhaliwal’s career started on Wall Street and took him to San Francisco’s world of startups and tech companies. As founder and CEO of the South Asian dating app Dil Mil, his background is steeped in the world of online dating. While working in the realm of dating apps, Dhaliwal noticed that users, especially members of Gen Z, weren’t meeting their matches in person. More specifically, that same Social Discovery Group report found that 70% of the singles never met their on- line dating matches in person. With that understanding, he concluded that since most online relationships be- tween people never take off from the digital world, a person might very well invest in a relationship with an AI chatbot. Making an AI your companion requires projecting human qualities onto the nonliv- ing dialog system, surpassing a mild emo- tional connection to create an intense bond. How exactly that bond eases a person’s lone- liness is uncertain and difficult to measure. EVA AI is a sort of specialized Chat GPT, the chatbot by Open AI that began trending throughout the past year. Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistants are prime examples of these types of chatbots. EVA AI has an evolving “personality,” the ability to change emotions and a voice fea- ture. Users can even customize what their EVA AI will look like. The app, which is free in Apple’s App Store, opens up with a humble promise that you will meet the best partner you will ever have. After signing up for a custom fantasy, you then choose the AI dialog system’s gender (female or male), name the system and select its age. It prompts you to share everything: “your mood, thoughts, the most intimate secrets and desires you can’t tell anyone.” The app warns that your AI companion “may not be the smartest sometimes, but has the main wish to become your soulmate and stay with you as long as you want it.” The anticipation builds, but before you meet your hand-selected dialog system, the app reminds you that it’s just a game and that your companion is not suitable for health advice. Very romantic. You’ll also be instructed to read secret notes in your companion’s diary, change its voice, or purchase gifts for it. You’ll have to pay a monthly fee for these features, just as you can expect to incur expenses in real-life relationships. Using this app might feel like stepping into a futuristic realm — one that’s more im- mersive than 4D — with virtual “compan- ions” sitting in your pocket, prompting you to change them as you desire. And it’s hard to get past the dystopian De Armas-Kerr lookalike catfish saying, “I’m at your service any time you wish me.” While apps like this one respond to a so- cial need for connection, it’s impossible not to wonder how these types of chatbots play into existing dynamics of gender-based vio- lence, specifically a wish by men to control their women partners. For Dhaliwal, the existence of AI chat- bots as companions is vital to the world. “Maybe [users] are learning how to com- municate better in a relationship or they just have certain anxiety about certain things,” he says. “They are able to vent about certain things in a judgment-free zone where the AI is just really good at listening and [responds] in a way that really helps you overcome things.” While some might see dating a system of code as deeply dystopian, Dhaliwal sees the innovation as being as logical as the genesis of email. “Before email, people would write let- ters,” he says. “People were like, ‘People are going to stop writing letters. We should shut [email] down.’” But people didn’t stop writing letters, Dhaliwal notes. People wrote letters when the occasion demanded it, and email helped people across the globe communicate more quickly. “There is going to be so much value cre- ated around this concept of people being able to have a majority of their relationships online and being able to access them when- ever they want,” he says. “I think a large part of human evolution and societal evolution in general is driven by how well humans com- municate with each other.” It’s easy and tempting to gawk at the ab- surdity of dating a nonliving robot being mar- keted as normal and necessary. One-sided romance is nothing new — think passionless marriages, sugar daddies and babies, people Social Discovery Group Various romantic AI companions on the EVA AI app are “at your service any time you wish.” ▼ Culture