3 ms·

Could GPT help with dating anxiety?

12 points by ibobev 2y ago

kittikitti 2y ago
Only someone who Big Tech let through their pearly gates could have wrote and promoted this article.
zeofig 2y ago
How about dating not being an app-fucked hellscape? That would help my dating anxiety.
- nradov 2y ago
  OK? But that is the situation that obtains today and it's not going to change soon, so your suggestion isn't actionable. But you can fix your anxiety.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
tcdent 2y ago
Anxiety is natural. Learn to confront it and grow through it. Avoiding uncomfortability is how you all got into this position.
- sapphicsnail 2y ago
  It's harder for some people. I used to get panic attacks and shoot out of bed in the middle of the night every time I went to a new social setting. People shaming me for being shy was how it got that big. I've stuck with it and it's a lot easier for me to be social now but it was working through the shame with a therapist, cutting out the toxic people in my life, and challenging myself that did it.
arrosenberg 2y ago
Nope, it almost certainly won't. If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups. Pick ones where you will see the same people regularly and make a lot of small talk. Small talk is where the magic happens, so have some hobbies and interesting stories to contribute. You gotta practice, that's the only way it gets easier. I fully acknowledge society makes it hard, and it won't happen for you unless you make it. Join a coed sports team or start going to the same trivia night every week. The rest kind of figures itself out.
- fragmede 2y ago
  How long has it been since a mass casualty shooting? I'd rather we live in a world where those don't happen, and what we've been doing so far hasn't worked. So while your advice works for some people, unfortunately it doesn't work for everybody. For someone with horribly low esteem/other problems that they've given up, giving them tools to help them get out of that hole so they are able to go out and make friends IRL seems like a win in my book.
  - arrosenberg 2y ago
    I am giving those people a tool. Find a local sports league, improv group or regular trivia night and start going. It's fine if you only talk to the person working the league or the employees the first couple times - they're paid to talk to you. When muscles atrophy, it's fine to take small steps to make them strong again. You are far more likely to die driving to work than you are encountering a mass casualty event - that kind of becomes an excuse at some point. If you are really concerned, the biggest targets are large public events and schools (US only), which aren't a great place to work on social anxiety anyways.
    - BannedUser1 2y ago
      I think his point was that, evidently, trying the same solutions over and over to the mass shooting problem is as futile as giving out the same trite dating advice. Not that he's concerned about joining an improv group due to the risk of mass shootings. We may have found Quinlan's HN account.
  - MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
    Mass shootings are significantly rarer than the world (and one's own anxious brain) makes them seem. The risk of dying from a so many other things absolutely dwarf the risk of being shot to death. You're more than twice as likely to die in a car accident than be shot to death. You're more likely to die from an accidental injury than be shot to death by about 10 fold. And that's just for all gun homicides. If you break that down, you're significantly more likely to die by a gun that's shot by yourself, a police officer, or somebody you know than by a stranger. Mass casualty events are even small. I agree with your point at large, though. The mass shooting panic is a little frustrating when you actually look at the numbers, though. Your risk of dying by gun assault is about 1 in 300, but the risk of dying in a mass shooting is about 1 in 11,000.
fragmede 2y ago
Lol "could". In my group of friends, one woman runs texts to and from her boyfriend through ChatGPT to analyze what he really says and means, and then she types out the unhinged (her word, not mine) response she would have sent and then she uses it to edit her response so she's not "that crazy chick" (again, her words). The example conversation does suggest a chat UI where you could rewind and try saying something different and see how it would play out differently would be quite useful for this sort of thing.
- jfengel 2y ago
  I could see that being useful if one is autistic and has a hard time understanding other minds. But that is a skill that every autist needs to learn to fake. You won't always have ChatGPT there to second guess you.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
christianqchung 2y ago
No. Betteridge's law. More seriously, while this piece is ancient in AI terms (May 2023), I don't think genuine emotional and social intelligence is something that can be learned at an average level by talking to AI or reading. Using the voice models is a step up from this, but I still think they're too tuned to following your instructions without nuance for something like this. If reading was enough to pick up social and emotional skills, I'd think that people who read the right books would be masters at several trades if it gave even 10% of the experience that real world practice did. I'm also not trying to be reactionary and dismissive, but how are you supposed to learn social cues from AI right now? In an optimal case, the LLM predicts accurately what would happen. Maybe you could say something awkward and the AI would say back <s/he lets out an exasperated sigh and turns away>; but in real life you have to notice these cues among a barrage of other factors. Would this really help anyone who is this desperate? Additionally, the tone of how you say words matters almost as much as the content, and this is missing from text. I concede that in extreme cases, some people could learn stuff from trying this, and that's a good thing. I just don't really know how much, who exactly, how, and whether they'd learn incorrect stuff as well.
ohgr 2y ago
You know what actually helps? Meeting people, going on dates, not being a creepy mofo and actually having something to talk about. That dialogue is worse than an anime pillow humping discord moderator.
- xigoi 2y ago
  Serious question: Where do you meet people with the possibility of finding a partner? I’ve tried pubs, board gaming clubs, dancing lessons, etc. but there were never any single women.
  - ohgr 2y ago
    Not sure where you are located but meetup.com groups are pretty good these days. Then again I’m after middle aged cat ladies these days. YMMV.
jjmarr 2y ago
Most LLMs give very lengthy responses compared to user input and can carry a conversation on their own. They're too easy. The winning dating sim for social anxiety will program a Dark Souls-level of difficulty dating sim in which the person is standoffish, hateful, and unstable, constantly rejecting you for social rules you don't understand. I don't know if that'll be good for society but incels will play it.
- jfengel 2y ago
  Don't date people who are standoffish and hateful. But if everyone you date is standoffish and hateful, the constant factor is you. It's not really about memorizing arbitrary social rules. It's about the ability to picture what the situation looks like from their point of view. Some people don't do that naturally, but it's a skill that can be learned. And you won't learn it by memorizing rules. You have to learn how to mentally model other people's minds.
  - jjmarr 2y ago
    And a fun game is to mentally model someone completely unhinged. Otherwise, players won't be interested. It's not interesting to mentally model the "helpful friendly AI assistant/girlfriend". She loves you and is generally a good person working towards your interests. A good AI-driven dating simulator needs characters with flaws and independent goals. Ones that struggle to divulge information or are contradictory at times. Real people are hateful, make mistakes, and act irrationally against their own interests. They follow arbitrary rules they invent or bend to justify their own behaviour. Not everyone will hand you their life story on a plate. LLMs (with the exception of Deepseek R1) are not able to roleplay that. They are trained innately for alignment and have a clearer specification of their values than the vast majority of humans. This is boring and un-educative.
- petahpintah 2y ago
  [dead]
only-one1701 2y ago
There’s a follow-up article to be created here about the modern obsession with comfort/convenience/never feeling challenged or really any negative emotion ever, and generative AI’s interaction with that.
slewth 2y ago
This post makes me pretty sad, dog. This is not a simulation of a date. It's an interaction with an automated customer service representative. It's someone trying to game out how to be vulnerable and connect with somebody else by volleying stiff dialogue off Samantha Samsung. The idea that this is a "near miss" strains credulity. I'm getting in a car with my spouse and driving into the hills.
throw310822 2y ago
Sorry, absolutely off topic, but I just realised that you've never seen Scott Aaronson and Dario Amodei together in the same room, and for a good reason.
photonthug 2y ago
Love Scott’s blog and respect his research and science communication efforts. I also think his political outspokenness is important and refreshing, regardless of whether you happen to agree with the guy. But this was difficult to read, and imho way off the mark. Socially awkward people are very likely to go through life getting called a robot anyway, so I don’t think it’s very helpful to direct them towards robot therapists or robot girlfriends.
sapphicsnail 2y ago
What helped me was spending time in groups where I was in the gender minority and also making female friends I wasn't interested in dating. If you're not just looking for sex, it helps to learn a bit of what it's like to be a woman and you're more likely to get that exposure in a space where women feel comfortable. I might be biased because I realized I related to women more than men and transitioned but I see so many sad guys that would make good boyfriends if they got a little more experience being around women.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
This idea that retreating more and more into virtual worlds is going to help with interactions with actual humans in the real world is pure tech-land insanity. For some reason a lot of tech people have a problem accepting that the solution to problems largely caused by tech isn't more tech. If you want to be better at interacting with people, go touch grass and interact with more people in the real, physical world.
petahpintah 2y ago
[dead]
gerdesj 2y ago
"Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuccessful nerdy young guys have regularly been emailing me, asking me for sympathy, support, or even dating advice." You can be a bit of a well meaning dick (for the US or wanker for en_*), or you can do the right thing. You do not paint "them" as you have done already. That's not helpful and can only be noted as "victim kicking". You should point them towards people or organisations that can help or do or say nothing which is better than being unintentionally sarcastically unpleasant. I am a fan of Scott A and will continue to be but this blog is not the best. Knowing when to say nothing is just as important as saying something.
codr7 2y ago
Worst idea ever, tech is what killed dating imo. You don't write requirement specs for partners, because it's evil and because you have no idea what your perfect partner is going to be like until you meet them.
- nradov 2y ago
  People aren't robots with technical specifications but there's nothing wrong with having some minimum requirements, as long as you're realistic. Like there's just no way I would have ever been willing to date a woman with a serious mental health condition, regardless of how "perfect" she might have been in other ways. If that makes me evil then so be it.
  - codr7 2y ago
    Show me a human living in this world without serious mental health conditions. My point is you have no idea who your perfect partner is until you meet them.
    - nradov 2y ago
      The vast majority of humans living in this world have no mental health conditions that would meet DSM-5 diagnostic criteria.
      - codr7 2y ago
        That's your opinion, I don't agree.
scarface_74 2y ago
I’ve been married for 15 years so I couldn’t even fake a dating conversation. This is the best I could do with using GPT to simulate a casual business dinner. I could see it helping me practice small talk if I were dating. https://chatgpt.com/share/680acde9-e458-8010-b6f2-33c970a9467c https://chatgpt.com/share/680acde9-e458-8010-b6f2-33c970a946... For what it’s worth: I was naturally an introvert before I got into consulting five years ago. I had to learn how to do small talk and listen for cues. Footnote #2: “CloudSync” is not a real company as far as I know.
jrflowers 2y ago
“Can retreating ever inward, pioneering new and more complete ways of irrevocably shedding any vestiges of human contact that simultaneously engender heretofore unseen levels of emotional dependence on a sterile, unfeeling, monthly subscription based phantom in a screen help with dating? Can forgetting humanity so thoroughly that we can only be comforted by the chatbot shaped absence of it help us to find love?” is so funny. I was trying to figure out why this is so silly to me and I realized that it’s because this is the plot to American Pie. Like, my man you’re doing a serious thought experiment version of pondering whether Jason Biggs’ character learned cool sex tricks by sticking his penis into the pie and if we could all learn cool sex tricks by fucking pies too. The answer was no, they named the whole movie after that scene because that idea was so stupid that every audience would see the comedy in how incredibly dumb of an idea that was

12 points by ibobev 2y ago

kittikitti 2y ago

Only someone who Big Tech let through their pearly gates could have wrote and promoted this article.

zeofig 2y ago

How about dating not being an app-fucked hellscape? That would help my dating anxiety.

nradov 2y ago
OK? But that is the situation that obtains today and it's not going to change soon, so your suggestion isn't actionable. But you can fix your anxiety.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

tcdent 2y ago

Anxiety is natural. Learn to confront it and grow through it. Avoiding uncomfortability is how you all got into this position.

sapphicsnail 2y ago
It's harder for some people. I used to get panic attacks and shoot out of bed in the middle of the night every time I went to a new social setting. People shaming me for being shy was how it got that big. I've stuck with it and it's a lot easier for me to be social now but it was working through the shame with a therapist, cutting out the toxic people in my life, and challenging myself that did it.

arrosenberg 2y ago

Nope, it almost certainly won't. If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups. Pick ones where you will see the same people regularly and make a lot of small talk. Small talk is where the magic happens, so have some hobbies and interesting stories to contribute. You gotta practice, that's the only way it gets easier. I fully acknowledge society makes it hard, and it won't happen for you unless you make it. Join a coed sports team or start going to the same trivia night every week. The rest kind of figures itself out.

fragmede 2y ago
How long has it been since a mass casualty shooting? I'd rather we live in a world where those don't happen, and what we've been doing so far hasn't worked. So while your advice works for some people, unfortunately it doesn't work for everybody. For someone with horribly low esteem/other problems that they've given up, giving them tools to help them get out of that hole so they are able to go out and make friends IRL seems like a win in my book.
- arrosenberg 2y ago
  I am giving those people a tool. Find a local sports league, improv group or regular trivia night and start going. It's fine if you only talk to the person working the league or the employees the first couple times - they're paid to talk to you. When muscles atrophy, it's fine to take small steps to make them strong again. You are far more likely to die driving to work than you are encountering a mass casualty event - that kind of becomes an excuse at some point. If you are really concerned, the biggest targets are large public events and schools (US only), which aren't a great place to work on social anxiety anyways.
  - BannedUser1 2y ago
    I think his point was that, evidently, trying the same solutions over and over to the mass shooting problem is as futile as giving out the same trite dating advice. Not that he's concerned about joining an improv group due to the risk of mass shootings. We may have found Quinlan's HN account.
- MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
  Mass shootings are significantly rarer than the world (and one's own anxious brain) makes them seem. The risk of dying from a so many other things absolutely dwarf the risk of being shot to death. You're more than twice as likely to die in a car accident than be shot to death. You're more likely to die from an accidental injury than be shot to death by about 10 fold. And that's just for all gun homicides. If you break that down, you're significantly more likely to die by a gun that's shot by yourself, a police officer, or somebody you know than by a stranger. Mass casualty events are even small. I agree with your point at large, though. The mass shooting panic is a little frustrating when you actually look at the numbers, though. Your risk of dying by gun assault is about 1 in 300, but the risk of dying in a mass shooting is about 1 in 11,000.

fragmede 2y ago

Lol "could". In my group of friends, one woman runs texts to and from her boyfriend through ChatGPT to analyze what he really says and means, and then she types out the unhinged (her word, not mine) response she would have sent and then she uses it to edit her response so she's not "that crazy chick" (again, her words). The example conversation does suggest a chat UI where you could rewind and try saying something different and see how it would play out differently would be quite useful for this sort of thing.

jfengel 2y ago
I could see that being useful if one is autistic and has a hard time understanding other minds. But that is a skill that every autist needs to learn to fake. You won't always have ChatGPT there to second guess you.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

christianqchung 2y ago

No. Betteridge's law. More seriously, while this piece is ancient in AI terms (May 2023), I don't think genuine emotional and social intelligence is something that can be learned at an average level by talking to AI or reading. Using the voice models is a step up from this, but I still think they're too tuned to following your instructions without nuance for something like this. If reading was enough to pick up social and emotional skills, I'd think that people who read the right books would be masters at several trades if it gave even 10% of the experience that real world practice did. I'm also not trying to be reactionary and dismissive, but how are you supposed to learn social cues from AI right now? In an optimal case, the LLM predicts accurately what would happen. Maybe you could say something awkward and the AI would say back <s/he lets out an exasperated sigh and turns away>; but in real life you have to notice these cues among a barrage of other factors. Would this really help anyone who is this desperate? Additionally, the tone of how you say words matters almost as much as the content, and this is missing from text. I concede that in extreme cases, some people could learn stuff from trying this, and that's a good thing. I just don't really know how much, who exactly, how, and whether they'd learn incorrect stuff as well.

ohgr 2y ago

You know what actually helps? Meeting people, going on dates, not being a creepy mofo and actually having something to talk about. That dialogue is worse than an anime pillow humping discord moderator.

xigoi 2y ago
Serious question: Where do you meet people with the possibility of finding a partner? I’ve tried pubs, board gaming clubs, dancing lessons, etc. but there were never any single women.
- ohgr 2y ago
  Not sure where you are located but meetup.com groups are pretty good these days. Then again I’m after middle aged cat ladies these days. YMMV.

jjmarr 2y ago

Most LLMs give very lengthy responses compared to user input and can carry a conversation on their own. They're too easy. The winning dating sim for social anxiety will program a Dark Souls-level of difficulty dating sim in which the person is standoffish, hateful, and unstable, constantly rejecting you for social rules you don't understand. I don't know if that'll be good for society but incels will play it.

jfengel 2y ago
Don't date people who are standoffish and hateful. But if everyone you date is standoffish and hateful, the constant factor is you. It's not really about memorizing arbitrary social rules. It's about the ability to picture what the situation looks like from their point of view. Some people don't do that naturally, but it's a skill that can be learned. And you won't learn it by memorizing rules. You have to learn how to mentally model other people's minds.
- jjmarr 2y ago
  And a fun game is to mentally model someone completely unhinged. Otherwise, players won't be interested. It's not interesting to mentally model the "helpful friendly AI assistant/girlfriend". She loves you and is generally a good person working towards your interests. A good AI-driven dating simulator needs characters with flaws and independent goals. Ones that struggle to divulge information or are contradictory at times. Real people are hateful, make mistakes, and act irrationally against their own interests. They follow arbitrary rules they invent or bend to justify their own behaviour. Not everyone will hand you their life story on a plate. LLMs (with the exception of Deepseek R1) are not able to roleplay that. They are trained innately for alignment and have a clearer specification of their values than the vast majority of humans. This is boring and un-educative.
petahpintah 2y ago
[dead]

only-one1701 2y ago

There’s a follow-up article to be created here about the modern obsession with comfort/convenience/never feeling challenged or really any negative emotion ever, and generative AI’s interaction with that.

slewth 2y ago

This post makes me pretty sad, dog. This is not a simulation of a date. It's an interaction with an automated customer service representative. It's someone trying to game out how to be vulnerable and connect with somebody else by volleying stiff dialogue off Samantha Samsung. The idea that this is a "near miss" strains credulity. I'm getting in a car with my spouse and driving into the hills.

throw310822 2y ago

Sorry, absolutely off topic, but I just realised that you've never seen Scott Aaronson and Dario Amodei together in the same room, and for a good reason.

photonthug 2y ago

Love Scott’s blog and respect his research and science communication efforts. I also think his political outspokenness is important and refreshing, regardless of whether you happen to agree with the guy. But this was difficult to read, and imho way off the mark. Socially awkward people are very likely to go through life getting called a robot anyway, so I don’t think it’s very helpful to direct them towards robot therapists or robot girlfriends.

sapphicsnail 2y ago

What helped me was spending time in groups where I was in the gender minority and also making female friends I wasn't interested in dating. If you're not just looking for sex, it helps to learn a bit of what it's like to be a woman and you're more likely to get that exposure in a space where women feel comfortable. I might be biased because I realized I related to women more than men and transitioned but I see so many sad guys that would make good boyfriends if they got a little more experience being around women.

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

This idea that retreating more and more into virtual worlds is going to help with interactions with actual humans in the real world is pure tech-land insanity. For some reason a lot of tech people have a problem accepting that the solution to problems largely caused by tech isn't more tech. If you want to be better at interacting with people, go touch grass and interact with more people in the real, physical world.

petahpintah 2y ago

[dead]

gerdesj 2y ago

"Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuccessful nerdy young guys have regularly been emailing me, asking me for sympathy, support, or even dating advice." You can be a bit of a well meaning dick (for the US or wanker for en_*), or you can do the right thing. You do not paint "them" as you have done already. That's not helpful and can only be noted as "victim kicking". You should point them towards people or organisations that can help or do or say nothing which is better than being unintentionally sarcastically unpleasant. I am a fan of Scott A and will continue to be but this blog is not the best. Knowing when to say nothing is just as important as saying something.

codr7 2y ago

Worst idea ever, tech is what killed dating imo. You don't write requirement specs for partners, because it's evil and because you have no idea what your perfect partner is going to be like until you meet them.

nradov 2y ago
People aren't robots with technical specifications but there's nothing wrong with having some minimum requirements, as long as you're realistic. Like there's just no way I would have ever been willing to date a woman with a serious mental health condition, regardless of how "perfect" she might have been in other ways. If that makes me evil then so be it.
- codr7 2y ago
  Show me a human living in this world without serious mental health conditions. My point is you have no idea who your perfect partner is until you meet them.
  - nradov 2y ago
    The vast majority of humans living in this world have no mental health conditions that would meet DSM-5 diagnostic criteria.
    - codr7 2y ago
      That's your opinion, I don't agree.

scarface_74 2y ago

I’ve been married for 15 years so I couldn’t even fake a dating conversation. This is the best I could do with using GPT to simulate a casual business dinner. I could see it helping me practice small talk if I were dating. https://chatgpt.com/share/680acde9-e458-8010-b6f2-33c970a9467c https://chatgpt.com/share/680acde9-e458-8010-b6f2-33c970a946... For what it’s worth: I was naturally an introvert before I got into consulting five years ago. I had to learn how to do small talk and listen for cues. Footnote #2: “CloudSync” is not a real company as far as I know.

jrflowers 2y ago

“Can retreating ever inward, pioneering new and more complete ways of irrevocably shedding any vestiges of human contact that simultaneously engender heretofore unseen levels of emotional dependence on a sterile, unfeeling, monthly subscription based phantom in a screen help with dating? Can forgetting humanity so thoroughly that we can only be comforted by the chatbot shaped absence of it help us to find love?” is so funny. I was trying to figure out why this is so silly to me and I realized that it’s because this is the plot to American Pie. Like, my man you’re doing a serious thought experiment version of pondering whether Jason Biggs’ character learned cool sex tricks by sticking his penis into the pie and if we could all learn cool sex tricks by fucking pies too. The answer was no, they named the whole movie after that scene because that idea was so stupid that every audience would see the comedy in how incredibly dumb of an idea that was