An advanced AI system developed in the US is being taught to flirt, churning out pickup lines to score a date.
Janelle Shane, a research scientist from Colorado, is the brains behind a squad of ‘courtship bots’ generating AI pickup lines that sound more like quotes from a Black Mirror episode.
Using a language model known as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3), Shane’s bots output is so advanced that it is hard to distinguish it from material written by actual humans. Although, looking at some of the things people put in their Tinder profiles these days, that’s not exactly difficult.
To extract the romance, Shane fed an article called “These are the top pickup lines of 2021! Amaze your crush and get results!” into four different variants of the program and prompted each to fill in what it predicted the rest of the article would be. Fans of Spike Jonze movie, Her, will be disappointed that the AI pick up lines aren’t nearly as sexy as Samatha’s (Scarlett Johansson), but they are oddly passionate and creepy.
I assumed that if GPT-3 generated pickup lines, they would be terrible because they would be something like human pickup lines. Instead, they are terrible for more delightful reasons.https://t.co/1RRT1LNnoe pic.twitter.com/jBb4PCzgE1
— Janelle Shane (@JanelleCShane) March 22, 2021
DaVinci, “the largest and most competent” of the four AIs, said Shane, came up with these somewhat wholesome gems:
- “I love you. I don’t care if you’re a doggo in a trenchcoat.”
- “You know what I like about you? Your… Long… Legs…”
- “Wait, this beanie hat, is it fashionable?”
- “You look like Jesus if he were a butler in a Russian mansion.”
“I love you. I don’t care if you’re a doggo in a trenchcoat.” is now officially the best pickup line I have ever heard. It was produced by AI. Stop using anything else.
— Rowboat (@Moly_No) March 25, 2021
DaVinci for The Bachelor next year, anyone?
Curie, which according to Shane generated, “the closest to depressing online pickup line lists out of all of the GPT-3 variants”, read more like a year eight English creative writing task.
- “Your eyes are like two rainbows and a rainbow of eyes. I can’t help but stare.”
- “I’m like the ice cream… You can keep me in the freezer for a while but then I melt!”
- “My name is a complicated combination of 45 degrees of forward motion, 25 degrees of leftward drift, 75 degrees of upward acceleration, and infinity and that is the point where my love for you stops.”
- “Hey, my name is John Smith. Will you sit on my breadbox while I cook or is there some kind of speed limit on that thing?”
Babbage, who reads more like someone who’s deleted and re-downloaded a dating app for the seventh time, got straight to the point:
- “You’re looking good today. Want snacks?”
But it was also a wee bit dramatic:
- “I Love You, I Love You, I Love You To The confines of death and disease, the legions of earth rejoices. Woe be to the world!”
- “(In your best Albert Einstein voice) ‘I wouldn’t change a thing’.”
Then there’s Ada, who sounded more like a spam folder than a potential love interest:
- “Body Softening Pads.”
- “2017 Rugboat 2-tone Neck Tie Shirt.”
- “Future Pop Tarts by Tracey Thorn.”
None of them will top the pickup line spouted out by a neural network Shane trained for the same purpose way back in 2017: “You look like a thing and I love you.”
And who said chivalry was dead?
