How we started - how we ended up
/thread

Hopping onto the trend b/c those articles are no joke, but - asides from Mashable - outlets writing about this story (eg. Daily Sun) are to be taken with a grain of salt.

So, @mashable got the scoop on this story earlier this year, and almost right away media outlets all over the world started to pick it up.

It was more of a personal experiment in time efficiency and researching what was possible with AI & chatbots, rather than me “coding my way out of loneliness” as some of the more spectacular headlines now suggest.

Anyway, truth is I know very little about programming. Just enough to analyze & adjust a few lines of code to bend it into doing things I want. Well.. most of the time.

The scripts and bots I used to “game tinder” - as writers state - were running smooth up until the point I didn’t turn them off anymore on my server.

Matches were racking up day & night and conversations were being held at increasingly high velocity beyond my own moderation.

At this point @Tinder got suspicious and their anti-spam algorithms must have kicked in. My account got suspended and I never got to say goodbye to any of my potential future wives.

Had it coming I guess. #karma

Fast forward a few months later to an afterwork event were I met a stunning girl. We started dating.

A few weeks in the relationship, upon further inspection of my @facebook pictures, see tells me she saw a few pics before and mentions matching me on tinder. Also, she claims to have had a conversation.

As you’d expect “I know from nothing” (as we say in Belgium)

I ask her what she thought we talked about, and she mentioned a few topics and lines I fed the AI. She remembers me ghosting her and starts to wonder about the reason.

At this point, I had no other choice then to come clean and tell her the story.

Fortunately, she was cool and not too appalled by my geekiness. We’re still together now, a few years later.

Full article & (video) interview on my experience with AI more on the future of online dating here: https://mashable.com/article/tinder-hack-bot-ai-dating/

PS: My LinkedIn to this day gets consulting requests from AI & dating startups. I can’t help any of them, as I still know too little about coding.

/end thread