Why Human Flirting?

You screenshot the conversation. The app analyzes it, finds the perfect hook, and hands you a line you could never come with on your own. 

It sounds amazing. You paste it. She replies. Is that authentic? Is that you? And if it leads somewhere real, does it matter?

Adam Dodge, Sloan Thompson, and Dr. Saed D. Hill wade into the world of AI-powered flirting and AI wingman apps, dating profile generators, and straight up outsourced small talk. What's at stake for a generation learning to date when AI can do the talking for them?

What You'll Hear

From Friend Group to Algorithm: Why AI Feels Different 

People have always leaned on friends for dating advice. So what makes AI different? Dr. Hill explains why people treat AI as objectively correct, and how that perceived neutrality short-circuits the push-back a real friend would give. Sloan adds: when your friend gives bad advice, you all fail together. That's how you learn.

The "AI Spark" and the Problem of AI Homogeneity 

Sloan names the moment AI engineers the perfect message at exactly the right time: the AI spark. Adam raises the bigger concern: when everyone flirts through the same algorithm, what happens to an entire generation's authentic romantic voice?

Gen Z Can't Tell. Millennials Can. That's the Real Story

Dr. Hill placed AI-generated and human-written dating profiles side by side and asked people across generations to spot the difference. Gen X and Millennials identified AI almost immediately. Gen Z? Most assumed everything was probably AI already. That generational gap in relationship literacy is the gap worth closing.

The Catfishing-to-Spell-Check Spectrum 

Is using AI for your opening message deception, or just a grammar assist? The hosts map out the ethical range: from AI agents fully running your dating app, to a young man using ChatGPT because he genuinely doesn't want to say something that makes someone uncomfortable. Both exist. The conversation makes room for both.

When AI Might Actually Help 

Dr. Hill makes a case for AI's potential benefits, especially for men with social anxiety or who've been getting relational cues from toxic influencers. A well-designed AI can interrupt a grievance spiral, model empathy, and introduce consent in a non-threatening way. Sloan notes that Anthropic employs a moral philosopher to shape how Claude engages, which matters more than most people realize.

Actionable Guidance

For everyone: Instead of framing AI-assisted dating as a moral failing, try asking if someone is using AI as training wheels, or as a replacement for their authentic voice? And if it’s the latter, how do they feel about that? 

For clinicians: Explore the "why" with clients: what feels scary about dating? What is AI providing that their friends, or their own instincts, aren’t? Help them notice when AI-assisted behavior is incongruent with their stated goals. If someone wants real connection but outsources every message, just naming that gap can be genuinely therapeutic.

Research Referenced

Center for News, Technology & Innovation: AI Chatbot Experiences (US & India) — on why people perceive AI responses as neutral and objectively correct

Mailbag
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello and welcome to Why Humans, a podcast about AI and the human reasons we turn to it. My name is Adam Dodge, and I am the founder of NTAB.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

My name is Sloane Thompson. I'm the director of training and education at NTAB.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

And I'm Dr. Sae D. Hill, and I'm a counseling psychologist and independent consultant in the field of men and masculinities.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Why human flirting is today's episode. Wingman apps, how people are outsourcing, opening lines, small talk, flirtation, game, Riz. Is that what the kids are saying? I promised I wouldn't say Riz on this episode because it gives Sloan the ick, and I went ahead and did it anyway. Um that's what the kids are saying. Yeah, this is something I feel like we say this on every podcast. This is something we've been talking about for a long time and really excited to discuss in the podcast. But it is absolutely a phenomenon that isn't going away. It's a it's a very valuable market to the companies that are creating these apps. And we really want to dive into it and talk about all the different ways that we could be thinking about it in positive ways, negative ways, and and how it impacts, I think, mainly youth relationships. But let's get into this. Sloan, is this even a big deal? Right. We've seen a lot of articles that are like, oh my gosh, wingman apps and you know, all the negatives that could come with this. But was this already a thing? Like, is this even worth a podcast?

SPEAKER_02 1:31

It is already a thing. I think it became a thing really, really fast. And every time there's a new technology, it feels like there's a big moral panic around it. It's like, this is gonna break the kids. And does it ever? But every time there's a big technology shift, it does change society in really key ways. And yes, AI is so big that this is a tidal wave hitting every single aspect of the way we relate to each other, the way we learn. And when we're talking about dating, it's both of those things. It's how are we learning who we are, who other people are, how are we forming relationships. And so when overnight, suddenly there's this AI-powered entity that's getting in the middle of our relationships. No, I don't think we are overblowing the situation to say this is a fundamental shift in how people are connecting with each other. And it's absolutely something that we need to talk about.

SPEAKER_00 2:22

So, what did exist before? People were giving each other advice and handing their phones to their friends when they're texting with someone. So this was happening. So why not let AI do it? It's all knowing, it's probably comes up with really good one like advice and openers and responses. What's the harm or what's the difference from having a friend do it versus AI do it?

SPEAKER_02 2:46

I think it's fundamentally different, but you're right that dating relationships, it's always been more than just those two people or the people involved in the relationship. It's always been about the friend group, the family. It's a it's just a it's a larger social experience. And people do turn to their friends, and that's an important part of building those friendships, relying on each other for advice. But also it's it's how people learn what is expected of them from their friends and family. And, you know, Saeed, I know that you were doing some interesting stuff about this, and I'm I'm really excited for you to share.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Yeah, I also think it might, although there might be some similarities in, yeah, like somebody we've all been, well, many of us have been in that situation. Like, oh, look at this text I got, this message I got from someone. Tell me what I should say, how I should say it, and that sort of thing. I think a big difference is how we perceive AI. There's a lot of statistics and a lot of information out there about people assuming that AI is just smarter than them as human beings, right? And I think a key difference here might be that as a human, when your friends are kind of giving you advice about like what to say or how to say it, there is some negotiation there that I often see about uh, I don't know if I'd say it this way, how I might say it. No, you can't say that. That's horrible, or you know, these sorts of things. Whereas with AI, and especially with some of the AI companion apps who are just giving you a script, it's encouraging you to just let go of the wheel and just allow AI to take over. And it doesn't allow the same sort of human review, I think, because psychologically we just assume AI's got it and it's gonna be safer and cleaner than we're gonna be as human beings, and we're trying to avoid the mess. So I think that is a key difference, actually how I see it.

SPEAKER_02 4:30

And you're talking about those statistics. And I heard about a really interesting study that came out of the Center for News Technology and Innovation, and they were surveying adults in both the US and India who were using Chat GBT for different things. And it's not just that AI is perceived as smarter, which is absolutely true. I mean, it's called artificial intelligence, but specifically they perceived it as more neutral, as just the average response of all the people in the world, all the things on the internet. And there's it was perceived as objectively correct for that reason. That like people perceive AI as if you were to pull a thousand people there, the majority of them are gonna say this. So that's what you should say. And in some ways that's true because it it aggregates data, it's predictive text. And also, exactly to your point, it makes it sound like this is 100% the thing that you should do is the right thing to do, rather than like everyone's got their own opinions about things.

SPEAKER_01 5:27

Interesting follow-up to that is that I think also in an age that feels very surveillance-y, right? We hear this from a lot from especially some of my students who are younger, my Gen Z students, who kind of say like people don't take as many social risks, whether it be messaging exactly how you feel about things, or hell, even dancing in public and things like this, because surveillance culture and people are gonna record you and put you on blast on the internet and all these things. And so people are choosing to be safer, quote unquote, or more neutral feeling out of fear. And I think there's a lot of fear and anxiety out there with surveillance the way it is sort of is and judgment the way it is, that it makes sense that people might just say, Well, hey, you can't come at me for this clean, average sort of conversation I'm having, but then there is no depth or range there. And where does that lock you in relationship-wise? So I think it's an interesting point to certainly get into.

SPEAKER_00 6:23

I've got one about the difference between going to your friends and going to AI for um relationship advice or how to flirt with this person, quicker and easier. It's quicker and easier. You get immediate results. It's very tailored, it's very polished. If it's a purpose-built dating uh advice app or Wingman app, you literally screenshot your conversation, it reviews it, finds anchors that it can cling on to to make it sound sincere and interesting to the other person. And then it crafts the response and you just copy paste. You don't have to go back and forth with your friends. You don't have to reach out to your friends. What if they're not available when you reach out to them? They might tell you something you don't want to hear. You know, even using a general purpose chatbot for this, like ChatGPT, it's sycophantic. Like it's gonna tell you what you want to hear, and it's gonna give you the relationship advice or the just the cut copy and paste advice. And I think that's a big difference for me is our friends aren't generally quickly writing down exactly what we say, and then we just copy paste it into our phones and send it out.

SPEAKER_02 7:29

Although I will say one important distinction here is that, and I see this come up all the time when people are comparing AI to humans. And certainly we've done this before. So I want to call us out on this as well. The assumption tends to be that we're comparing AI to a really competent person or the best person. And it's like, well, this is all the things you could get if you went to a human instead. And let's just acknowledge here that other humans kind of suck at this too. Like it might be a situation where, yes, you're going to your friends and then your friends give you bad advice because they also don't know. And especially when we're talking about like teenagers, we're all learning about dating in real time. But to Said's point about the stakes involved and how you're going to feel if you make a mistake, especially make a mistake publicly, it's a bonding experience that like you and all your friends made the mistake together. Like you all learned something here together. And I can certainly think about times when I was a middle school girl or high school girl and we all just had no idea what we were doing and we failed as a friend group. And we all like, and now we look back like, ho, ho, good times. Because we learned. And then to your point, Adam, if people are just going to Chat GPT, they're not getting the opportunity to have that learning experience together and become better at dating and flirting together.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

Yeah. So this is, I think, very much a Gen Z issue, right? Because they're not getting the reps. They're not building their skill set, they're not doing something that makes them uncomfortable, which is reaching out to someone and putting yourself out there, right? They're they're relying on AI to sort of take that risk for them, even though they're the ones sending it. I wonder if the stakes are lower, because it's like, well, AI wrote it. And if it's it it creates some kind of boundary for them that it's not if they get rejected, maybe it's not them. I'm just coming up with this right now, but I'm gonna go with it. But maybe if they get rejected, it's a little safer because AI wrote it, it's not them getting rejected, right? It's AI. And if it works, then maybe they push AI to the side and they take over, take, you know, get off autopilot and start driving the conversation themselves. But I do think it's a Gen Z issue, Saeed. I know you've had the opportunity to talk to millennials and Gen Z folks about this exact thing, whether it be a completely outsourced flirtation or an AI-enhanced one, where you write it and then you give it to AI and say, you know, zhuz this up for me and then send it. What are you seeing on the ground, Saeed, on this? Because I think it's not a lot of people are having those conversations with these communities.

SPEAKER_01 10:07

So to let a lot of people know, what I've been doing is I created a poster where I pasted on there AI profiles, dating profiles, like snippets from AI dating profiles versus some human profiles that I got some permission from a couple of friends to use, or I found some stuff for just from some studies from public consumption and that sort of thing. And I put them side by side with each other and asked a range of people of different ages and experiences to break down, well, what do you think is AI here? And what do you think is human? You know, generated profiles here. And it was a range of folks from Gen X, millennials, Gen Z. And overwhelmingly, millennials and older spotted the AI almost immediately. They could kind of tell, and even if they couldn't exactly say why they thought it was a human who wrote it or AI who wrote it, there was a certain, I, you know, and people are gonna hate this, a certain vibe that they just picked up on. And then when prompted and sort of asking him to really deconstruct it, were able to name certain things. And for people out there, things like specificity, humans are gonna be a little bit more specific most of the time about the kinds of things they're interested in, give some more details about themselves. To Sloan's point earlier, it's not as like general or like everyone could write this sort of feeling, right? Our Gen Zers struggled completely with this exercise. Most of the time, they couldn't identify at all what was AI versus what was human. And as a matter of fact, most of them just automatically said, I just feel like all of this is probably AI. Which considering our last conversation we were just having, I find that really interesting too, where they didn't even want to really contend or like decipher or really pull apart the messages to kind of say why something might be AI or not. They were just immediately, no, this is probably all AI. And I think it does bring up something about when I really broke it down with everybody, a lot of our Gen Z folks are just used to people using AI quite a bit. And a lot more people are using AI than we even want to probably assume. And so they are used to maybe already a world where a lot of people just use AI for messages, for emails, for work stuff, for dating, for all sorts of things. And so there's this automatic response of like, this could all just be AI. Whereas like some of the older folks I did this with kind of said, like, I have a lot of experience with like dating profiles from like the mid-2000s or early 2010s, right? And I've been studying profiles for a long time. This is how people talk, this is how people don't. There's a certain amount of tech literacy, even if someone's not taking a class on this, they've gotten reps, right? The experience deciphering these sorts of profiles from AI. And so you saw a real generational divide that was really sort of fascinating to me in the early stages of doing this sort of work.

SPEAKER_00 12:55

Yeah, I would say even it's not even about tech literacy, it's about relationship literacy, right? Like this is how human beings actually talk to each other when they're flirting online. And it's very obvious when you feed that to ChatGPT and it creates a more polished version for you. And I think what this tells us is we have the first generation of AI kids right now, right? And they don't have the lived experience of the millennials and the Gen Xers and others. So what do we do about this? I think that's an opportunity. There's a knowledge gap there, right? That is historically, we just are passive about this. Well, it's just this, this is now this generation is not, they're not colliding with online pornography or social media addiction. They're colliding with AI and all the ways it's going to impact their relationship skills, their attachment styles, and things like that. And I know we're all on the same page about this, but I reject that. Like we have got to stop and do the thing, kinds of things that you're doing, Said on campus, and have these conversations and understand their perspective, but then also do something about it. And we'll we'll get into this later, but I think it starts with raising awareness. Like, yeah, this is not okay. Like, I don't want everybody thinking, oh, well, it's just all AI, right? Because what does that do to connection and authenticity and spark and everything, right? Or are we just in this? It feels like AI homogeneity and for a generation of kids. And once you see it, you can unsee it, and we should do something about it.

SPEAKER_02 14:36

When you talk about, you use this phrase a lot and I really, really like it. You say AI spark, that that you just when you see someone and it they've just said the perfect thing. And so you get that like butterfly feeling of, oh my gosh, I found someone that I really want to talk to. And that's the AI spark because AI is designing that moment for you or escalating into that moment more quickly than a human being might be able to on their own. Said when you're describing this activity that you're doing out with the world, I would be really interested to see you asking people not just is this AI or is this a person? Because that's a huge part of it. And that goes to the authenticity. Is this who this person actually is? Which is always going to be a really important question to ask. I would also be really curious about can you read this person's intentions based on what they're saying? Because that's that is huge in dating. It's because of the way this person has written this message or set up their profile. I know what they're looking for. I know what they want in general. I know what they want for me. And just me on dating apps, because I'm on dating apps. Yes. Yes. I'm making judgments about what people want, especially what men want by how much effort they're putting in. And so one of the huge things about AI is that it's going to make someone look like or could potentially make someone look like. They're putting in a lot of effort when they're not. And that's a value judgment for me about who they are and their intentions. And honestly, are they a good person or not? Are they a safe person or not? So could you be out talking to Gen Z and say, you know, subtext? Let's read subtext. Like based on this message, what do you think this person's looking for? I'm sorry to like, what do you what do you think about that?

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah, you know, I think that that's a really interesting thought. And certainly a question that we should be asking. What I find with a lot of the people that I'm talking to about this when we've gotten into the weeds more, is a lot of people don't exactly know what they want either, you know? And I think it's kind of hard to kind of say, even for some of them, like, well, well, what are the intentions here? Well, they they might have some thoughts about that, but even what are your intentions, you know, being on this too? What do you actually want? And what's your opinion on people even potentially using AI on this? I mean, I think the closest I got to having these sorts of discussions was just asking people, you know, have you used AI in your dating life before? You know, if people use AI to write messages to you, what's your opinion on that? I think a lot of it is we we don't always like sit with like what people's values are about like online dating and what they want and what they don't want and these sorts of things. And so yeah, I think that this is definitely another piece of this that we should definitely follow up on. Is uh, you know, can you can you decipher intentions and how important that is to you for this? So no, I I love that thought though.

SPEAKER_02 17:24

And one of the things where I think there is pretty universal agreement is that, because I've talked on college campuses to students about this as well. No one's gonna admit that they're doing it. They might admit that they're doing it to you when they're talking about it later, but in the moment, they're not gonna admit to the other person in that conversation, like, oh, by the way, I'm using AI to help me through this. I think universally it's I'm gonna hide the fact that I'm doing it. I think we hide it when we write emails for work. I think we hide it when we're on dating apps. And yeah, in general, there might be like a, oh, everyone's using Chat GPT. But I'd be curious about why people would have that discomfort disclosing in the moment that AI is helping them. And is it, is it that they don't want to admit that they weren't quite sure what to do? Is they, is it because they feel like morally they're doing something wrong and they don't want to be perceived as a bad person? And I think, you know, that there's not one objective answer there, but it's certainly an important indicator of how people are feeling about what they're doing here.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

It certainly would be an interesting conversation to have with students about how they would feel about somebody using like flipping it, not about the motivation, how the person who's using it feels, but how do you feel if the spark, the connection, the time you invested with somebody that you met online was actually AI generated. And the person that you were connecting with was AI, not this human. And my guess is it would depend on whether the relationship was successful or not, right? Like if it ends up being a huge waste of time and like, oh, I don't like this person, I don't connect with this person, then people are gonna say, yeah, I don't, I have a problem with that. But if it end, if it gets them into a relationship that they're actually really happy with, maybe they might have a different answer. I don't know. I'm totally speculating, but I'm curious. I'm so curious about how people think about this because I do believe when we ask these questions, I don't think anybody's ever asked them these questions before. So they haven't really considered it. And if they're just answering from just shooting from the hip answer without considering how they really feel about this, I think we're gonna get weird data. But I think the more we raise awareness and talk about or in a conversation about these things, I think we'll actually get really thoughtful answers. And I know you're both chomping at the bit to say something.

SPEAKER_02 19:46

Well, I'll just say really quickly, I think it would be the opposite from what you just said. I think that if some if the relationship doesn't go anywhere, people might be like, okay, whatever, they used AI, or I caught them, ha ha. But if you got into a relationship with somebody and then you found out that the whole time you were dating them, that it was actually just AI. And now you're, I don't know, I would feel more betrayed. But that's like a Sierra No de Bergerac thing. That's like, you know, oh, you were protecting someone else was writing your messages for you. My sister and my brother-in-law have a framed screenshot of the first few texts that they sent to each other on hinge in their because that was so important to them. That's how they met. That's the story they tell to all of their friends and family about, you know, oh, what brought you two together? And it was really cute and it was so personal. And that's what caught my sister's attention from my brother-in-law in the first place. So yeah, I don't know. If you're in, it's like we're three months into this, and now you're telling me that like those weren't your words. I don't know, I would feel really betrayed.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

Yeah, my opener just said you up, question mark, so I didn't frame it. And a beautiful love story. Your sister sounds much, much better.

SPEAKER_01 20:55

Uh yeah, wife and kids from that. That's amazing. Amazing, you know, it's a success story. Well, I did ask this question, right? Of everybody I did this poster with. Like, how would you feel if you found out that someone that you connected with, you found out they were using AI to write those messages to you that you found really endearing or flirty and fun or whatever it was. Almost immediately, the immediate response was betrayal. Like, no, I would not enjoy that. They're lying. You know, this is a form of catfishing, then, you know, this is uh an issue. I think what was interesting is then I followed up with reasons somebody might do it, where I kind of mentioned things like, I don't know, it could be a range of things. It could be someone's like social anxiety is pretty high, or someone's lack of confidence, or it could be even like some range of disabilities that people might have, right? Um and so when I asked prompted people with those sorts of things, like give a little context to other reasons people might do it, people typically soften their stance a little bit. Bit more because their mind automatically went to someone trying to betray them or lie to them and deceive them, as opposed to these other reasons. Ironically, though, a lot of people might use this technology because of their lack of confidence and fear of rejection and things like that. When in actuality, that's a pretty universal human experience that I imagine if you just were honest about that. I wonder how people would perceive that on the other end of a dating thing. But it's a very vulnerable thing to write or say. But I do wonder also about that is like if even if you got the date or something like that based on these AI messages, if you went in there right away and kind of came clean about it and said, like, hey, I did use AI for this and I'm sorry, but it came from this place of anxiety and stuff. Like, I do wonder how that human honesty after the fact might play out over time. But uh it's it's something I'm thinking quite a bit about right now.

SPEAKER_02 22:52

It's funny that you should say that because as I'm listening to you talk, I have had almost the exact same conversation with students over and over again about ghosting, that it's something that everybody's done, it's something that's happened to everyone, they hate it when it happens to them. It feels cruel when it happens to them. They totally understand it when they do it. And if you get into the weeds and say, well, why, even if you don't like this, like why would someone do it? Then a lot of empathy is born by trying to put you yourself in that other person's shoes. And it's a lot of the same reasons why people might do it: the anxiety, the low confidence, all of that, not having the skills and the moment to navigate something that's genuinely very difficult to do. So I think it kind of goes back to when we are dating on opposite sides of a screen, we feel like we have permission and we feel like we have opportunity and we feel like we have incentives to do things that we also know we hate when it happens to us.

SPEAKER_00 23:48

Well, there's an empathy deficit online. We all know that, right? When you don't see another person sitting across from you, it's either easier to say things, write things, do things that you would never do in person. And I what I really like about actually what both what both of you said, but Saeed, going back to you, what you were doing, I think, and maybe this is sort of a path forward, is you were baking back in or you were re-injecting empathy, honesty, authenticity into the equation as almost like a counterbalance to this phenomenon, right? Because if we don't do anything and we just let AI run the ship, then I think we're gonna get those people are gonna feel deceived. It's gonna be very polarizing. But when you start injecting those things back in, I think we start to see what is possible and how we could exist in a world where AI is doing some of the writing for us.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

I want more people to realize that, you know, at a time where a lot of people are feeling more disconnected from humans in their lives and or might be turning to AI for companionship and all these other things, people are experiencing the same things. People are deeply empathetic to each other, but I think we need better facilitated conversations to bring people back together around this, as opposed to just exporting it all to AI. Like I've said this for a while. I I think it would be cool if the country like elected a relationship therapist to be president. You know, like I think it's like one of the things.

SPEAKER_00 25:14

What are you talking about? We already have a relationship therapist in office on all these things.

SPEAKER_01 25:17

Yeah, right. Exactly. I think, but this is, you know, the honest truth. Like when you kind of bring people to the table and sort of talk to them a little bit more about like reasons they're doing this, why they're ghosting each other, why they're using AI for this and that. It creates a lot of empathy and it and honestly reminds me of things I was doing when I was a couple's therapist. Like when I was working with with marriage in marriage and family, where I had couples who were deeply disconnected sort of coming together to really be vulnerable with each other and realizing they were a lot more similar than they were different, actually. And they just were not communicating about it because there's so much stigma around the shame and the anxiety and the lack of confidence and and all of these things. But then when you create a space for them, it actually enhanced the relationship quite a bit because you have to take some of those interpersonal risks, and that's not what AI is designed to help you do.

SPEAKER_02 26:02

And in that list, Adam, that you gave about, you know, the confidence and the empathy, you know, you're also bringing up authenticity. And that's something that we've been talking about. And when I think about a pitch or like argument sounds like a slightly too strong term, but what I'm going to say to someone in Gen Z about that might wake them up to their experience here, what might be happening, authenticity is something that I really emphasize because I think that authenticity is very important to everybody, but to specifically to this generation, because it's they've grown up in a social media environment where so many things in their lives feel like a performance and that everyone else is performing as well. And you're performing for likes and reshares. So who are you like underneath all of that? Uh, who's the core of yourself? And so one of my big concerns is people growing up relying on Chat GPT to make or any sort of AI to make the choices that define them, who you are in relationships with other people, who you, you know, flirting, we tend to be like flirting and minimize it, and it's not that serious and it's a silly thing to do. But how you flirt, how you approach people, how you put your best foot forward, how you view yourself as attractive or not attractive, or other people as attractive, those are really core elements to any sort of person who's interested in romantic relationships. And so I think this idea of you're building your authentic self and your identity and your understanding of who you are. I don't know that that has landed really well when I'm talking to young people about, you know, the risks, benefits of relying on AI.

SPEAKER_00 27:41

It's sort of a continuation of what we see with social media, I think, which is social media is very performative. We're broadcasting a version of our lives, a version of ourselves that is not consistent with reality. It's perfect, it's keeping up with everybody else. And we know that has negative impacts on well-being and self-esteem and confidence when you're constantly projecting a version of your life that is quote unquote enhanced, but not actually your real life. And I think this is just an extension of that, right? It's like, well, now I can apply this enhancement model to the way I talk, to the way I connect with other people. And I can show the best version of myself on social media, and I can show the best version of myself when I reach out to people that I want to date or uh connect with online. So I think AI companies are very much following the playbook in many ways of social media companies. And again, like we've seen this movie before. If we're passive, we know what's gonna happen. That's why we're doing this podcast. We actually want to do something different this time at the moment of inception so that we can give this generation of AI kids a chance, right? And well, Sloan, go ahead. And then I'd love to talk about just quickly like the benefits of this. I think we're really skewing towards the challenges, but like people are gonna be using this. So I also want to just name that as well. Like, what are the benefits here? So go some, but sorry, go ahead, Sloan.

SPEAKER_02 29:08

Well, one little point that I just want to spin off of what you were just saying is you were talking about on social media being the best version of yourself. And then AI gives you an opportunity to be the best version of yourself. But I would just tweak that a little bit because I think there's nuance in there. Social media is crafting the best version, the performance of yourself, but crucially of yourself. Whereas this, it's not even yourself anymore. It's the best version of a person who's dating. And then I'm copying and pasting that successful person into my conversation. It's it's not even me. So yeah, I think that's a risk. But you know, let's get the ball rolling on benefits here. People are learning something. They're I know Saeed, you you say something a lot about like people aren't reviewing the game tapes, and I think that absolutely happens where someone's just copying and pasting AI, or they've got an AI agent out on a dating app just doing it for them and they don't even know what the AI said. But, you know, every time Chat GPT generates a response for you, theoretically, you're reading it, you've learned something. If you had to then write your next one on your own, you would have in mind what Chat GPT did. And so, yeah, maybe you are learning something valuable, especially for someone who I don't, I even go back to the grammar and spelling of it. You know, you um, Saeed, you mentioned something when you were first telling me about this about on a scale from catfishing to just spell check. Where do you think ethically it falls having Chat GPT write your answers? Not everyone has those just straight up writing skills that someone else might be looking for in a dating app. So chat GPT helped them and that can just be a good thing. I actually think it can be a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 30:52

Yeah, I also think along with that is just I I do think, and I have found that it's been very helpful with the skill building and confidence boosting uh of people, you know, just the practice of it, uh building confidence and even when people get like a message back. I I'm curious what the research is going to show over time because it's still so early, but I imagine that when people start to feel more confident getting messages back or see that their messages are being responded to and people are engaging with them more by use of AI. I don't always necessarily think it'll lead to more, more AI use. It might actually make people feel, whether accurate or not, a more sense of personal confidence potentially, where they might ideally move off of AI more and just say, like, okay, I'm okay. Like, I got this. Like I, you know, kind of needed it for a while. It was the training wheels, if we think of it that way. And now someone's sort of like running behind us and we took the training wheels off, pushed us off, and we're kind of off and we're going. And we feel a little bit better about it. So I do think it could be something that helps in the initial stages, helps with that confidence, helps you gain a little bit of skills so you can go out on your own in that way. So I think like that's one part of it. I think the other part is certainly around all the things we talk about with like loneliness and creative outlets and all sorts of stuff. Like people are afraid of that sort of rejection. People are afraid of being alone, you know? And I think this also helps people in these initial stages feel more connection, feel not judged. And when you don't feel so judged, and when you feel more empathy and you start to experience less social anxiety or, you know, get more support, it feels like, through the use of this technology, that kind of opens up a lot more space for you. And when you open up a lot more space for you mentally, emotionally, and those sorts of things, psychologically, there's a lot of possibilities potentially where you might just be better out there interacting with the world and that sort of thing. That's the hope. And so I think those sorts of things can also be really helpful.

SPEAKER_02 32:53

And Saeed, you know, you're the healthy masculinities expert. So I would be really interested if this is something that's ever come up when you're talking to people. But one thing that we haven't really talked about thus far is sexual harassment and harm on dating apps. And one thing that, you know, we've really been talking about is this a betrayal if Chat GPT crafts things for you? And I know that certainly when we think about AI wingmen apps specifically, they're often running on this play artist script of manipulate a woman into dating you. And that's there's just so much harm there. And I think that's, I think most people agree, that's pretty solidly in the category of catfishing. But I think it also operates in the other direction as well. When I talk to college students, so many of these young men are they genuinely want to do the right thing. They would never want to hurt someone or make someone uncomfortable, but they know that there are all these things that they might do or might say that might make a woman feel harassed, or they're they're worried that that's gonna come at them. And so I can imagine being a 19-year-old boy, I'm trying to date for the first time. Maybe I've never had a girlfriend before. And I'm like, oh, rather than wonder if I'm gonna hurt somebody, Chad GP's gonna give me the right thing to say. And I know it's like, it's there's no risk of me saying the wrong thing or stepping in something here. The girl's gonna take this well. And I've got this, I've got this like checklist. It's gonna be okay. So have you seen people have that?

SPEAKER_01 34:23

Absolutely. And and let me just say this too. If it comes down to, which I don't think it should always come down to these two choices, but if it came down to learning these skills from AI or an AI companion versus like some of these guys out here on podcasts, you know, men with mics trying to tell you how to like looks max and like, you know, get messages back and treat women and all this other stuff. I mean, I'd much rather have AI trying to teach me that than these guys who are who are really influential, right? So I've seen many times uh men who say have a lot of grievances about women, maybe they've rejected in their lives a lot. Women only want this sort of man, and I'm not that sort of man, so I hate that about myself and this black and white thinking, or they they've experienced a lot of rejection and they don't have a sense of identity when it comes to dating sometimes. I've seen AI really help actually soften some of the grievances that they have toward women because the model is also sort of modeling some, or the algorithm is sort of feeding you some sense of empathy around some of these relationship dynamics, which I think is an interesting thing for these men to sort of experience. It's not always reinforcing entitlement by always complying. Sometimes AI might like give you the perspective of a woman saying no to you in some sort of context. It might teach you a little bit about consent in that way. It can maybe de-escalate your rumination. Like a lot of us are just like here on our own with no support, ruminating about these social interactions we've had and projecting onto all these social interactions and reinforcing our already maybe poor thoughts about women and dating. And AI can interrupt that. It can absolutely help de-escalate that sort of thought process by giving you a different kind of support, interrupt that grievance spiral, and give you like sort of a non-violent relational way to uh interact with women, potentially, right? It can help you talk about boundaries and consent dynamics and negotiate those sorts of things, help you think about accountability, conflict resolution. There's a lot of dynamics that it can hit you with, you know, and then give you a different look that you may not get on your own, or you're definitely not getting from any of these guys on podcasts, men with mics who have a platform but have actual no real social skills themselves when you really break it down. So I think in that way, that's also very helpful.

SPEAKER_02 36:46

When I think about some of the differences between, you know, Chat GBT and Gemini and Claude, Anthropic has an on-staff, like moral philosopher to try and craft the kind of ethical entity that Claude is going to be. And I just think that's absolutely fascinating. This idea of AI-generated empathy. And is the chatbot designed, trained for ethical decision making? And yeah, it's like what is ethics? And is it coming from our progressive side of things? But yeah, but if you train a chatbot to skew away from misogyny, to skew away from violence, then yeah, it might be that moderating influence in someone's life.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

We get to this point in our podcast where we talk about actionable things people can do. Is there anything either of you want to share that you haven't already talked about?

SPEAKER_02 37:36

In terms of normalizing and destigmatizing conversations around this, I think it'll be very important to never refer to this or reference this as a moral failing. Um, I think that shuts down conversations and it's going to keep all of this happening in the shadows in the background. There's some sort of unmet need in someone's life that is causing them to turn to AI in this situation. It's a skill that they don't have or an anxiety that they do have, or someplace where they think that the genuinely best option in this situation for them is getting some extra help from AI. And if we just assume that it's laziness or it's someone trying to trick another person, if we're assuming bad intentions there, I just don't think we're ever going to be talking about this publicly the way that we really need to.

SPEAKER_00 38:31

What if we do discover the intentions are bad? What if we do discover that someone's is actually, we have this conversation, we're just crushing it right with this person who's using it. And then it turns out that they are just using it essentially to manipulate people into having sex with them or hooking up with them. What do we do then? Right. I mean, it's not really a new issue in the AI world, but I think it might be enhanced in the AI world.

SPEAKER_02 38:59

Then where I think we're just in the same playbook that we have, our tried and true playbook for violence prevention and response. That how do we help somebody to understand the impacts of their actions? How do we make space for them to take accountability for what they've done? I think understanding the impacts of that choice on other people is a huge part of that. But that this sort of larger education of let's not think about this just as what you wanted or what you needed on your side of the screen. Let's always connect it to the experience that the other person is having when they are led into this emotionally intense and possibly even dangerous situation because of the role AI played in this situation. I think that's part of the conversation too.

SPEAKER_01 39:47

I do think in general, if people are going to use this sort of technology, they really need to grapple more with the whys of that they're using it. What is dating to them in the first place? Like, what do they want out of dating? You know, what is this technology providing to them that a human relationship is not? And even for our younger people out there that people are trying to like understand, like we talked about Gen Z quite a bit. I ask questions about like, well, what feels scary about dating, if anything, to you? You know, what feels intimidating about it? And then using that as a sort of a point to like connect it to why people are going to AI and these sorts of things. I think people need a space to process these sorts of questions. And especially when I work with college students, they're not doing that. They're they're going to class, they're they're they're going 100 miles an hour every day. So we need to provide, if we say we care about these relationships and the future of relationships with these um, you know, younger folks and people of all ages, we need to give them space to work it out. And we we don't really take the space and slow down to do those sorts of things. So we need to try to do a better job of that.

SPEAKER_02 40:46

Metaphorical space for emotions and physic literal physical space. Because if all dating interaction is happening through text and dating apps are the only place you're meeting people, social media is the only place you're meeting people, then of course people are going to rely on AI because they have a shield to do it. People aren't using this in in-person conversations. They're using their voice, they're using their face. So if we start creating more spaces to facilitate people meeting in the wild, people meeting in person, people going on dates in person, then it just incentivizes people to learn how to do these things themselves with their face and their identity attached to it.

SPEAKER_00 41:28

My response to what you just said is not yet, but wearable technology, smart glasses with speakers by the ears is going to create the opportunity for people to get real-time guidance and scripting from AI on what to say and how to say it in face-to-face interactions. That's going to happen. It's not happening right now. As far as we know, that's going to happen. So, all the more reason to be talking about this now before it even levels up again. Thank you both so much. You are rad. I love doing this with you, and I always learn so much. Thanks so much for joining us, everybody. Please catch up with other episodes. Feel free to reach out if you want us to cover something in a future episode. We've got lots of ideas, but we'd love more. Take care.