The New Yorker:

Two new novels reflect anxieties about A.I. coming for our hearts as well as for our jobs.

By Jennifer Wilson

Last month, a new dating app called Volar launched in New York City, with the promise “We go on blind dates. So you don’t have to.” To sign up, you enter your name and phone number, then submit yourself to a brief interview with a chatbot matchmaker. When I made an account, Volar’s bot asked what line of work I was in. “I’m a book critic,” I replied. “Recently,” I typed, “I’ve been reading a lot of speculative fiction. Right now, I’m reviewing two books about A.I. and dating.” By answering, I was training an A.I.-powered avatar to act as my representative in the virtual meet market. Seconds later, Volar invited me to read transcripts from three dates “I” had just gone on. In one, my avatar broke the ice with an admittedly not terrible joke: “Just finished a book and now transitioning to real life conversations [smile emoji]. How’s your day going?”

As modern dating has evolved into an online-first activity, artificial intelligence has found its match in a generation of users for whom tech-assisted romance is the default mode. The Kinsey Institute revealed in this year’s “Singles in America” survey that fourteen per cent of Gen Z-ers admit to using A.I. to optimize their dating lives. Volar is just the latest company to leverage the new technology in the love space. For help crafting seductive dating-app profiles, love-seekers don’t need Cyrano de Bergerac—they can simply download Cyrano, one of countless “rizz generator” apps (“rizz” being Gen Z slang for charisma). When love dies, there are such apps as Texts from My Ex, which lets A.I. scan messages from a former flame for signs of incompatibility. A woman fresh from a breakup with a jerk named Cesar let A.I. perform an autopsy on their correspondence; she posted her results to Reddit, writing, “I let AI examine our text messages = validation at last.”

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