[The day when you regularly send a digital version of yourself to act as your agent in interactions with other people (and their own digital agents) may not be far off. This short story from Fast Company reports that the video dating app Snack
now lets users send “AI-trained avatars of themselves … out into Snack’s virtual dating world to chat with other users” and “if [it] thinks there could be a match, it’ll report to you so you can decide for yourself and start a real human-to-human conversation.” A bit ironic given that one of the app’s tag lines is “Show the Real You.” Slate
has a related, longer story titled “My Epic, Embarrassing, Shockingly Successful Ploy to Get My Friend a Date Using A.I.: What happens on Tinder and Bumble when your wingman is ChatGPT.” –Matthew]
Gen Z dating app Snack lets your AI-trained avatar go on dates so you don’t have to
We live in the future now and this is a thing that’s happening.
By Michael Grothaus
March 9, 2023
I never thought I’d start to consider dating apps like Tinder to be old-school dating until I found out about Snack’s new tool to help Gen Z and millennials find the love of their lives.
If you haven’t heard of Snack, it’s one of the newest dating apps, first released in late 2021. It has a TikTok-like interface and is designed primarily for Gen Z. Being the upstart dating app, Snack certainly isn’t afraid to make some bold choices. In 2022, it introduced a feature that literally made users invisible if they ghosted other users too often. Given how big a problem ghosting can be in the dating world, that feature was pretty cool.
But Snack’s latest feature—well, “cool” isn’t the right word. “Bizarre” and “intriguing” are better ways to describe it. That’s because Snack is jumping on the AI bandwagon, now allowing users to create AI-trained avatars of themselves. These AI avatars of you then go out into Snack’s virtual dating world to chat with other users. If your AI-trained avatar thinks there could be a match, it’ll report to you so you can decide for yourself and start a real human-to-human conversation.
Look, I don’t know what to tell you. We live in the future now and this is a thing that’s happening. In a way, it’s brilliant, as letting your avatar go out and size up potential dates frees you from the time-consuming mundanity of chatting with total strangers on dating apps—chats that often go nowhere. In another way, it’s dystopian, where the human element of first contact in dating is completely upended.
One thing is for sure: You better make sure your AI avatar is trained well enough so it represents you the best it can. You apparently train it by telling it things about yourself before you send it into the digital wild to mimic you.
And Snack isn’t stopping here with AI-powered avatars. It says its ultimate goal is to have users eventually go out on dates in a metaverse-like virtual world before deciding whether to meet in person. Again, that’s laudable from an innovation and safety perspective, but it also removes the physical human from the first steps in dating.
I will say this: I want to see where Snack’s AI-trained avatars go. It’ll either be a massive flop or a game-changing paradigm shift in dating. If it’s the latter, it’s another sign that AI will eventually creep into every corner of our lives, and much sooner than we thought.
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