A couple of years ago, we rolled our eyes at men with dead fish on Tinder or strange characters who started a conversation with the word “hello.” Those were golden times. Honest ones, informs Ukr.Media.
Today, if you suddenly like a 36-year-old “director” who looks like Chris Hemsworth in his prime, don't rush to plan a vacation together. Chances are, you've just paired up with an algorithm.
I recently came across a column by a British woman, Alice, 53. She lives in the suburbs, tries to find someone alive on dating apps, and describes her experience of encountering a new level of digital hell.
She was texted by an absolutely perfect man. Her friends, looking at the photo, quickly put her down: it was a generated bot.
The scale of this disaster is simply mind-boggling. According to a Norton report (they called it eerily and aptly, “Artificial Intimacy”), more than half of what we see on dating apps is pure illusion. 57 percent of users use artificial intelligence to write witty jokes. 56 percent use it to retouch their faces and bodies.
That is, you are lying on the couch after a hard day at work, flipping through the feed, laughing at the cool jokes of your potential partner, but in reality you are flirting with the code.
There are even special applications for this. A kind of Cyrano de Bergerac of the GPT chat era, which suggests how to respond wittily to seem smarter than you are. The developers justify this by saying that people simply want to look better and hide their flaws. But where is the line between “smoothing out the corners a little” and a full-fledged cyber scam?
Psychologists frankly say that mature women are at the greatest risk here. And it's not because someone becomes more naive with age.
Psychotherapist Marisa Peer explains everything harshly: the choice of adequate men narrows, there is a feeling that the system is playing against you. And the human psyche is so arranged that it desperately seeks an emotional connection. And when this connection appears – even if it is not real, logic simply refuses.
A friend of the same Alice told how she had been corresponding with a “London businessman” for months. He was incredibly handsome, understood her perfectly, responded to messages instantly, but… never had time for a real meeting. In the end, she realized that she was just being divorced and blocked him.
The feeling of disappointment and shame after such a thing usually makes people keep quiet, although statistics say that one in twenty people over 65 encounter romantic scammers every week. I suspect the real numbers are much scarier.
But the saddest thing about this story is something else. For the sake of the experiment, Alice ran her regular photos through an AI generator. She got a glossy version of herself: a Hollywood smile, no wrinkles on her skin, bigger breasts. She looked as if she had been covered with a fresh coat of varnish. And she threw it into a dating app. Do you know how it all ended? The number of likes skyrocketed, and the age of applicants dropped sharply, although she honestly indicated her 53 years.
This is an absolute slap in the face of modern reality. It turns out that to arouse interest, simply being a normal, living person is no longer enough. You have to become a picture.
I look at all this and think: maybe those men with imperfect teeth and tired eyes in the photos are our last island of authenticity. At least they exist.
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Who is to blame for the death of sincerity: men who are only looking for a picture, or women who produce fakes themselves?
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👺 Men want dolls 🎭 Women lie themselves 🤔 Delete these apps
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