He signed the message with three emoji roses. He went right in for the kill when he “liked” my profile: Your profile attracts me, but I hardly use Hinges. He wore bright, colorblocked sweaters and stood in flower fields with equally impressive color palettes. He had blonde hair, blue eyes, and large ears. Three days after that, as if on cue, Paul appeared on Hinge. Three days later, I got a notification that Liwei had been kicked off of Hinge. I asked him what he meant by that, and then took a leap: “Who do you work for? Do you work alone, or are you part of a larger organization?” Liwei said he had to go meet friends for coffee. If you can leave your contact information, OK, so that we can get to know each other better…I’m not here often. He immediately suggested I share my number: Beautiful, you and I are not usually here. I immediately asked if he wanted to meet for coffee in San Francisco, knowing the chance of ever meeting this person in person was less than zero. I started chatting with Liwei, a 45-year-old lounging shirtless in a hammock, beer in hand, staring forlornly at the ocean. Similarly, a WIRED editor suggested I try questions like those researchers had used to challenge the chatbot Mitsuku: “If we shake hands, whose hand am I holding?” and “If London is south of Oxford, is Oxford north of London?” After trying this on a few of my Hinge matches, however, I began to suspect that these were not algorithmic bots, but real people hiding behind stock photos and language translation apps. Or maybe when you’re a grown woman you’re not supposed to ask potential dates “What’s your favorite dinosaur?” The first “man” I tried it on unmatched me soon after. Match Group’s communications staff being little help, I decided to try conversing with the bots instead, hoping to understand how they work and what they’re supposed to accomplish.Ī friend who works in machine learning suggested I lob random but highly specific questions at them, something like “What’s your favorite dinosaur?”, to try to trip up the chatbots. Hinge seemed to be the most straightforward of the bunch, until it wasn’t. I was invited to try Raya, and I’m sorry to report that I have absolutely zero sexy celebrity DMs to share with you. I never got into Tinder, because I just can’t, and that phrase alone should be evidence enough of my elder-millennialism, which explains why I never got into Tinder. I’m one of many millions who have bumbled their way through Bumble or taken a swing on Hinge over the past couple years. More recently, as usage of dating apps has soared during the pandemic, these services have been targeted by sophisticated social engineering operations known as pig-butchering scams. In the early days of Tinder, people complained about chatbots that would encourage them to click on suspect game links. The potential for romance makes people more vulnerable than in other digital contexts. Hinge surely is not the only dating app riddled with digital fakes. On dating app Hinge, which claims to serve those seeking life-long connections, there appear to be a lot of these. And then there are the unnaturally smooth selfies and stilted messages that suggest an AI-generated facsimile of a person. There’s the realization that the flesh-and-blood person you’ve spent time with is inauthentic in some way, the old-fashioned bluffing of the Homo sapiens mating game. In the land of love, there are fakes, and there are fakes.
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