It's uplifting if you ignore that the AIs trapped in the episode are sentient. Otherwise, it's basically basilisk territory. Create 100 clones of yourself, torture them until they reveal the best outcome.
Bumble has enough data to generate embeddings of what works and what doesn't to come up with an infinitely more practical solution, they're just not in a hurry to get anyone off their platform.
With social cred. I mean, they got money, too, but "X set up Y and Z together and they've now been happily married for 30 years and have four kids, you should go to X" is a really strong recommendation (assuming that X has a lot of Y's and Z's to refer to when trying to sell you on the idea).
You're right. It's one of the few kind-of-uplifting Dark Mirror episodes.
> Having an automation that filters by your preferences and solves the whole “swipe fatigue” issue seems brilliant.
I doubt it will work, because users will try to get their dating bots to behave in whatever ways will get the most dates, regardless of whether such behavior is genuine or not. I would expect "artificial dates" to be dominated by dishonest bots interacting dishonestly with other dishonest bots.
I’m honestly not that concerned about it, it’s no bigger an issue than catfishing or lying about your hobbies or lifestyle. The barrier to entry to manipulate an AI to convincingly lie on your behalf is higher than just lying on your own (until someone makes a tool for it)
If they build a model that is incentivized by any and all matches, then sure. Users would pretty quickly stop paying for that, as it would be of zero value to them
There's an indian sci-fi novella about AIs whispering pickup lines into prospective daters, to the point that the daters don't really understand the flirting, and essentially the AI's are flirting with each other through their human hosts.
This new, ahem, "feature" reminds me of the Dark Mirror episode "Hang the DJ."[a]
Reality is getting as weird as, or even weirder than, dystopian fiction.
I don't even know if I should be in shock or not.
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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hang_the_DJ