- If I asked you to have a guacamole
party with me, would you do it?
If she would say yes, then the bot would smile
and playfully say okay do women love
anything more than avocados?
(suspenseful music)
Oftentimes when there were dull evenings,
I would try to find dates.
Whenever I had free time I was
on the toilet or something and start swiping.
And it's a massive time sink.
I thought there had to be some
kind of way to automate this process.
That's the reason why I started
working with this Tinder bot.
It was on a github, and once you open it up
it looks like Facebook Messenger almost.
It's a web interface for your Tinder.
You can chat with the girls.
You can see their user icon on the left.
You have the conversation on the right.
And you also have the terminal window running
where you can see what the bot is doing.
And with some customizations on the script,
you could also start a conversation automatically.
And take positive and negative sentiments.
And from thereon, the bot would start a mini conversation.
The second step is where you actually
train the bot to know your preferences.
In the background, there is an elementary
machine learning method running.
(suspenseful music)
It detects things in the picture like color.
Hair color, eye color, facial structure
for the cheek bones, and so forth.
With all these machine learning images
that are being input into the system,
the system actually gets to learn what you like or dislike.
And can actually start making this decision for you
without you having to interact with it.
So yeah, the more pictures you swipe yes or no to,
the more accurate the AI or the bot can decide for you.
If it needs to move forward with this match or not.
- The overall challenge with a lot of males
on Tinder or any other dating app is that,
okay they won't get responses because
their profiles or pictures are not good enough.
I was in that camp where hey, I wasn't really getting
that many dates through dating apps.
I felt like I was putting a lot of time into it.
So, I was like okay, why don't I try to develop an AI
that would automate the process for me.
So, on a simple level, you can use machine learning
to make predictions about certain things.
The idea behind it is to kind of replicate
the neurons in your brain to make
the most intelligent predictions
based on as much data as possible.
(upbeat music)
What deep learning can do is it can
actually learn the edges of the faces
or the different shapes inside an image.
So, I was able to extract a lot of data
that I had already liked myself.
And use that to train the model.
However, one of the problems was
that I actually probably dislike
most of the profiles that I see.
So, then the algorithm only learns
the profiles that I dislike.
I had to get more data of people that I liked.
I ended up just using a scraper
and scraped a bunch of Google data.
I trained it with images of females that I found attractive.
For the bot I had a automated message
that I can change every time I got a match.
And then once I got a match then
I can start a conversation there.
- If I want to build an artificial intelligence
that learns my interests in women,
I have to first collect a lot of data about women.
I developed a method that teleports my profile
to different locations in Switzerland.
Just fetched all data for all women in that area.
And then categorize the women
systematically into categories.
I like the woman or I dislike the woman.
In like 48 hours I fetched 40,000 images of women in my area
so that it can figure out which women
I like in my area and which I don't.
I then used a Tinder API to get people in my actual area.
And used my pre-trained artificial intelligence
to swipe on Tinder in an intelligent way.
Also taking into account some of the meta data.
Like the university of the person.
The location of the person.
Or the land from the profile description it provided.
- Hinge came along and they make you actually
send a message based on a piece of content.
It does end up that there's five photos that everyone has.
There's a dog photo, there's a holding my nephew photo.
There's a hiking photo.
It's literally like you can categorize it.
How do you optimize that interaction?
And the idea I had in my head was to call it a Witty Bot.
'Cause I was watching the banter in the box.
To imagine in a world where you don't
target letters and words to make meaning.
You start with your intent and your like (hums)?
I like her.
Based on whatever the photos are
that can auto-write that entire box.
I mean, don't even think of it as a bot.
Think of it as your friend who's your concierge,
who's gonna find you a date.
- It's a funny story, my girlfriend she was one of
the matches that my bot created on Tinder.
And my bot actually started a conversation with her.
Very random at a party a few months after I met my current
girlfriend and I was immediately attracted to her.
But she didn't know that I was the guy from Tinder.
And I didn't know that my bot had
a conversation with her in the past.
And I told her the story that I'm now telling you,
and she's like, oh yeah, I remember!
And you said that, that, and that.
That was exactly the conversation from the bot in the tree.
- The Tinder bot I built has a 90 to 92% ratio
in which it swipes correctly for me.
This is not a very good performance for my personal usage.
I could easily have message women as well using my bot.
But I didn't implement that feature.
- I was thinking, okay I'll see
how many matches I can collect.
The last time I checked the matches were around 1,200.
I think in swipes maybe 10,000, 20,000 times at one point.
The bot was having maybe 200 conversation at the same time.
And I think (chuckles) at Tinder they noticed.
And then they banned me of course from the platform.
- The response when I told women that I built an AI
that automated Tinder was that they were
actually very impressed by it.
I think most of the women I've gone on dates with
were not in say an engineering type of field.
So, to them they thought it was
a very magical thing that I had built.
- I went on a date with someone who was like
a chief marketing officer at one of the dating apps.
And I just was like, what do you think
about this kind of idea that I'm working on?
And (chuckles) I showed her.
She's like, if you give this to the world
you're gonna manipulate everyone!
And [bleep] guys are gonna trick women, and blah, blah.
I was like, whoa, I didn't give it to anybody.
I'm just working on it.
(suspenseful music)
- I, as someone on Tinder, did I consent to
having my data taken off Tinder?
And used in this way?
I love what could possibly go wrong?
That's my favorite design question
as a design researcher and design educator.
So, this isn't just an issue of dudes being weird
and trying to date as many people as possible.
Which is creepy and Tinder should not allow creepiness!
It's also a heightened level of
inappropriateness, if you will.
Because someone is taking your data,
creating a machine learning model around data in aggregate.
None of the women or people consented to that.
How will it feel as a woman who's
never interacted with that person?
Or a person who's on the site who
ends up just in their data scraping?
How will that person feel being in their data set?
If any of this data could be accessed,
think of all different kinds of
domestic violence issues that could arise out of this.
Maybe no one knew you were on Tinder.
And now this big data set's out there.
And people can access it.
Maybe you get a stalker.
What if people are scraping men seeking men or women
seeking women in countries where homosexuality is illegal?
What do you do?
What do you do if you're a marginalized person?
You're part of the LGBTQI community.
And you're in a country where this looked down upon.
Well, then this poses an extreme security threat.
And that shouldn't be lessened in this conversation, right?
That is a problem.
- Tinder just doesn't try at all.
Their API is so easily accessible.
I can just teleport myself all over Switzerland and fetch
data and pictures of everybody on whole Switzerland.
That don't have to try.
They just offered the data for free basically.
So, it's very easy to hack it and it's
very easy to data mine from it.
- These are real security vulnerabilities
that platforms need to take seriously.
And Tinder, as a dating app, needs
to view itself as a platform.
- A creep tries to abuse the scripts we write
to get himself dates, then yeah, of course he can do that.
And that's true, but the other side of
open sourcing our script is that Tinder
has the possibility to see how we spooked
their API and how we hacked the Tinder.
The real problem is that Tinder
doesn't do anything to prevent us from hacking it.
- I'm of the mindset that bots should always be disclosed.
In a setting like Bumble or Tinder or Hinge
where you aren't expecting to engage with a bot.
You're expecting to engage with a real person.
(suspenseful music)
It's like, that's a great way to push users off the site.
Especially if they're getting a high frequency
of interactions that they're not used to.
Which looks and feels like spam.
- Yeah, I've seen that men or women are using
artificial intelligence to just really run numbers.
And even bots to communicate for them.
I think that it's only one more reason
that I'm not currently on any dating apps.
- Because I've got concerns that any time
that you're not the one who's personally writing
your responses or evaluating a potential match.
- I found that a little disheartening
because I feel like I have done the work.
- If your intention is to find a match and date,
there's a better way to do it.
If your intention is to use software
to feed my ego, to feel better about myself,
there's a [bleep] of software, ways that you can do that.
Match with everyone, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe.
Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!
That's a very shallow, hollow kind of world
that I don't know I would wanna do.
- Yeah, partially why I stopped using it for dating
was because I had a really met,
I didn't get somebody that I
really clicked with through an AI.
(suspenseful music)
- As a woman, I would not be interested in
an automated dating app that did the algorithms for me.
Or used AI.
Because to me that takes away the personal touch of it.
I'd rather have one match in a month.
- Hardly on the edge of morality
to even swipe on women using a bot.
And to actually write them automated messages.
To me it was just a bit too much.
- I see the issues, and I totally agree with them.
There's no laws yet, so it's kind of like Wild West.
I believe there's gonna be regulations
and things that have to be traded
around the space in the next two to three years.
That will dictate how everyone has to play in the space.
Realizing the bot space is knowing
if it's a machine or a human I think is very important.
(suspenseful music)
The reason I didn't put it out there is not as much about
the assistant writing and a bot that can help you,
it's more about disclosure and the efforts around that.
It's giving the power of better words to men
who otherwise maybe wouldn't say that.
Or aren't that good of a person.
For the good that I think it can do,
if not disclosed or packaged correctly
or used with the wrong intention.
Words have power and I think it can be a dangerous thing.
- And this is kind of the problem
with Silicon Valley's hacker or "fix it" mindset
is they get hyper-focused on one problem.
And the problem this was optimizing dating.
But what they didn't take a step back and look at was
what could possibly go wrong if other people
with different agendas can use this?