Two AI’s walk into a bar to figure out if their owners are a match

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Amid humans’ fear of artificial intelligence, and stories of people falling for bots (and sometimes of bots seeming to fall for people), Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd says there’s nothing to worry about. AI can not only help you meet people, it will one day be able to meet them for you.

Herd was recently interviewed by Emily Chang for the news site Bloomberg about how, among other things, AI might influence dating and dating apps like hers.

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You’ve got people falling in love with bots and … bots posing as real people,” Chang said, looking disturbed at the idea. “This is getting really terrifying.”

Herd was calm. “It’s a little freaky but that’s a fad,” she said. “I mean listen, I’m sure there are people out there that might form friendships with some form of AI, and that’s fine.”

She then moved into a talking point. “Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships, and that also starts with yourself. How can we actually teach you how to date? How can we help you show up in a better way?”

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Asked for an example, she was ready. “You could in the near future be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities. ‘I just came out of a breakup.’ ‘I have commitment issues.’ And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself. And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people.”

Not even pausing after the utterance of the phrase “AI dating concierge,” Herd continued: “If you want to get really out there, there is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with (another) dating concierge.”

To nervous laughter from Chang and the crowd in attendance at the interview, she said: “No truly, and then you don’t have to talk to 600 people … to say these are the three people you really ought to meet. That’s the power of AI if harnessed the right way.”

Later in the interview, Herd said the 10-year-old company had been using AI and machine learning for several years “before it was super trendy.” She added: “I think you are at the very early innings of what this platform looks like.”

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Several years indeed. It was soon noted that Herd’s “really out there” example mirrored the plot of a Black Mirror episode from 2017. In “Hang the DJ,” two people are set up by a match-making device called a “coach” (not a concierge) and decide to rebel against its enforced time limit on the relationship. But in a twist, they discover they are actually simulations of real people, matched to see if their real-life versions would make a good couple.

This of course raises the philosophical question, beloved by Elon Musk and others, of whether what we see around us is in fact a computer simulation, and that none of this is real. Herd’s conversation with Chang didn’t get into those weeds.

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