That first statistic, that it swiped right 353 times and got to talk to 160 women, is completely insane. I mean, that’s almost a 50% match rate, whereas estimates in general are 4% to 14%.
Given Russia's fucked-up gender ratio (2.5 single women for every single man), I don't think it's that unreasonable!
Generally, the achievement of "guy finds a woman willing to accept a proposal" impresses me far less in Russia than it would in the USA. Let's see if this replicates in a competitive dating pool.
1I am extremely surprised to read that Russia has such a harsh gender ratio (86 men for every 100 women), that's way more aggressive than even China (105 men to 100 women).
I wanted to know why and so I interrogated ChatGPT for a bit, it explained the following:
- The Soviet Union lost around 14% of its population during WWII whereas the UK and France each only lost around 2%.
- Also (somehow) life expectancy for Russian men is 68, whereas for UK and French men it's like 79, and yet the women of Russia is like 78 (much closer to the UK and France's 83 and 85 respectively).
I am surprised I haven't seen more thinkpieces written about gender dynamics in Russia, which I expect would sway heavily in the men's favor as they're the minority.
I also generally update down on Russia's health and competence at war.
The WWII generation is negligible in 2024. The actual effect is partly the inverted demographic pyramid (older population means more women than men even under normal circumstances), and partly that even young Russian men die horrifically often:
At 2005 mortality rates, for example, only 7% of UK men but 37% of Russian men would die before the age of 55 years
And for that, a major culprit is alcohol (leading to accidents and violence, but also literally drinking oneself to death).
Among the men who don't self-destruct, I imagine a large fraction have already been taken, meaning that the gender ratio among singles has to be off the charts.
2
1If someone managed to actually do this for real (probably not possible with current AI technology), that's polluting the commons. Dating apps are useful because they offer personal contact. If dating apps become full of fake personal contacting, users of dating apps will take this into account and trust such apps less. And if people don't trust dating apps because they're full of fakes, the apps will become less worthwhile. (Even independently of the fact that fakes themselves make the apps less worthwhile.)
To be honest, dating apps are already broken. Maybe it's better dating apps die soon.
On the supplier side: Misaligned incentives (keep users on the platform) and opaque algorithms lead to bad matches.
On the demand side: Misaligned incentives (first impressions, low cost to exit) and no plausible deniability lead to predators being favored.
The real dating happens when you can observe many potential mates and there is a path to getting closer. Traditionally that was schools, clubs, church, work. Now, not so much. Let's build something that fosters what was lost.
There are always outliers, but given how unremarkable that guys seems to be its a complete BS article. If he would have been gay, then maybe I could have believed those numbers if they were divided with at least 10. I know some fellas that hit up dudes on Grindr and that's a different ball game (no pun).
Anyways, I think that this video does a pretty good job trying to explain the math behind the skewness in likes/matched that heterosexual men and women experience on dating apps
We have long been waiting for a version of this story, where someone hacks together the technology to use Generative AI to work the full stack of the dating apps on their behalf, ultimately finding their One True Love.
Or at least, we would, if it turned out he is Not Making This Up.
Fun question: Given he is also this guy, does that make him more or less credible?
Alas, something being Too Good to Check does not actually mean one gets to not check it, in my case via a Manifold Market. The market started trading around 50%, but has settled down at 15% after several people made strong detailed arguments that the full story did not add up, at minimum he was doing some recreations afterwards.
Which is a shame. But why let that stop us? Either way it is a good yarn. I am going to cover the story anyway, as if it was essentially true, because why should we not get to have some fun, while keeping in mind that the whole thing is highly unreliable.
Discussion question throughout: Definitely hire this man, or definitely don’t?
With that out of the way, I am proud to introduce Aleksandr Zhadan, who reports that he had various versions of GPT talk to 5,240 girls on his behalf, one of whom has agreed to marry him.
I urge Cointelegraph, who wrote the story up as ‘Happy ending after dev uses AI to ‘date’ 5,239 women, to correct the error – yes he air quotes dated 5,239 other girls, but Karina Imranovna counts as well, so that’s 5,240. Oops! Not that the vast majority of them should count as dates even in air quotes.
So right away we notice that this guy is working from a position of abundance. Must be nice. In my dating roundups, we see many men who are unable to get a large pool of women to match and initiate contact at all.
For a while, he tried using GPT-3 to chat with women without doing much prompt engineering and without supervision. It predictably blew it in various ways. Yet he persisted.
Then we pick things back up, and finally someone is doing this:
Look at you, able to filter on looks even though you’re handing off all the chatting to GPT. I mean, given what he is already doing, this is the actively more ethical thing to do on the margin, in the sense that you are wasting women’s time somewhat less now?
And then we filter more?
This is an interesting set of filters to set. Some very obviously good ones here.
So good show here. Filtering up front is one of the most obviously good and also ethical uses.
As is often the case, the man who started out trying to use technology that wasn’t good enough, got great results once the technology caught up to him:
That first statistic, that it swiped right 353 times and got to talk to 160 women, is completely insane. I mean, that’s almost a 50% match rate, whereas estimates in general are 4% to 14%. This was one of the biggest signs that the story is almost certainly at least partly bogus.
After that, ChatGPT was able to get a 7.5% success rate at getting dates. Depending on your perspective, that could be anything from outstanding to rather lousy. In general I would say it is very good, since matches are typically less likely than that to lead to dates, and you are going in with no reason to think there is a good match.
If you are communicating as a human with a bunch of prospects, and you lose 92% of them before meeting, that might be average, but it is not going to feel great. If you suddenly take over as a human, you are switching strategies and also the loss rates will always be high, so you are going to feel like something is wrong.
Did he… not… read… the chat logs?
This kind of thing always blows my mind. You did all that work to set up dates, and you walk in there with no idea what ‘you’ ‘said’ to your dates?
It is not difficult to read the logs if and only if a date is arranged, and rather insane not to. It is not only about the gifts. You need to know what you told them, and also what they told you. 101 stuff.
I mean, yes, sounds like there was a lot of room for improvement, and Calendar integration certainly seems worthwhile, as is allowing manual control. It still seems like there was quite a lot of PEBKAC.
Also this wasn’t even GPT-4 yet, so v2 gets a big upgrade right there.
Great strategy. Abundance mindset. If you can afford to play a numbers game, make selection work for you, open up, be what would be vulnerable if it was actually you.
I mean, aside from the ethical horrors of outsourcing all this to ChatGPT, of course. There is that. But if you were doing it yourself it would seem great.
Then he decided to… actually put a human in the loop and do the work? I mean you might as well actually write the responses?
Once again, if you give even a guy with no game 4,943 matches to work with each month, he is going to figure things out through trial, error and the laws of large numbers. With all this data being gathered, it is a shame there was no ability to fine tune. In general not enough science is being done.
On the contrary, that sounds extremely normal, standard early dating activity if you are looking for a long term relationship.
So what he is noticing is that quality and paying actual attention is winning out over quantity and mass production via ChatGPT. Four at a time is still a lot, but manageable if you don’t have a ton otherwise happening. It indicates individual attention for all of them, although he is keeping a few in ‘familiar’ mode I suppose.
He does not seem to care at all about all the time of the women he is talking with, which would be the best reason not to talk to dozens or hundreds at once. Despite this, he still lands on the right answer. I worry how many men, and also women, will also not care as the technology proliferates.
This sounds so much like the (life-path successful) pick up artist stories. Before mass production, chop wood carry water. After mass production, chop wood, carry water.
Except, maybe also outsource a bunch of wood chopping and water carrying, use time to code instead?
So even though he’s down to one and presumably is signing off on all the messages himself, he still finds the system useful enough to make a new version. But he changes it to suite the new situation, and now it seems kind of reasonable?
Nice. That makes so much sense. You use it as an advisor on your back, especially to ensure you maintain communication and follow other basic principles. He finds it helpful. This is where you find product-market fit.
Well, that took a turn, although it could have taken a far worse one, dodged a bullet there. The traditional script is that she finds out about the program and that becomes the third act conflict. Instead, he’s doing automated job searches. He earned a few bucks, but not many.
And then the tail got to wag the dog, and we have our climax.
Notice how far things have drifted.
At first, there was the unethical mass production of the AI communicating autonomously pretending to be him so he could play a numbers game and save time.
Now he’s flat out having the AI tell him to propose, and responding by having it plan the proposal, and doing what it says. How quickly we hand over control.
The good news is, the AI was right, it worked.
So how does he summarize all this?
Twitter translated that as 200 rubles, which buys you one coffee maybe two if they are cheap, which indicates how reliable are the translations here. ChatGPT said it was 200k, which makes sense.
What drives me mad about this whole thread is that it skips the best scene. In some versions of this story, he quietly deletes or archives the program, or maybe secretly keeps using it, and Karina never finds out.
Instead, he is posting this on Twitter. So presumably she knows. When did she find out? Did he tell her on purpose? Did ChatGPT tell him how to break the news? How did she react?
The people bidding on the movie rights want to know. I also want to know. I asked him directly, when he responded in English to my posting of the Manifold Market, but he’s not talking. So we will never know.
And of course, the whole thing might be largely made up. It still could have happened.
If it has not yet happened, it soon will. Best be prepared.