Could GPT help with dating anxiety?
48 comments
·April 24, 2025arrosenberg
thorum
I think realistic simulations of social interactions would help many people - by providing a low pressure environment for socially awkward people to practice the skills you mentioned, before putting themselves out there in groups etc. - but realism is an absolute requirement. No current AI will do that for you, they are not good at roleplaying realistic humans, and they’re too nice.
If you want a “practice date” to give you useful training that transfers to real life, your conversation partner needs to react to you just like a human would. Including negative reactions (not liking you, thinking you’re weird, faking a call from a friend to escape mid-conversation, and so on). But if you could make an AI that did all that, and it could also give you the sort of actionable feedback that is hard to get from humans, I think that has potential.
nradov
We're still quite far away from an AI that can simulate human eye contact, facial expressions, and subtle vocal cues realistically enough to be useful for teaching social skills. I expect that training people using the current level of AI is more likely to make them worse at dealing with actual humans in ways that are difficult to measure.
nradov
Joining groups and socializing is great. But please don't be that creepy guy who hits on all the women in the co-ed softball league or scuba diving club or whatever. That ends up driving the women away and ruins the group for everyone.
scarface_74
I can’t see any way that it won’t come across as creepy. But like the old saying goes, “if you look good it’s flirting, if you’re ugly it’s harassment”
paulcole
> If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups
Agree on the friends side, disagree on the partner side.
I have never met a romantic partner anywhere but through an app. It lets both parties be clear with their intentions. I don't have to guess if they're there to make friends or date. I can say in my profile, "I am here to date."
If they respond to my message, I can ask them out immediately (max of 2 or 3 messages before making IRL plans) because I know there is at least some mutual interest and that we both want to go out on a date.
arrosenberg
I won't discount you here, because two of the best marriages in my circle were from dating apps (albeit back when they were more useful, like 2013-2014), but far more of them are based on what I said - regular interactions, lots of small talk, and time to develop closeness. It takes longer, it's less efficient, but it gets results and I don't think dating apps are really doing it any more - it certainly didn't for me.
0x5f3759df-i
> I have never met a romantic partner anywhere but through an app.
And I’ve never met a romantic partner on a dating app. If you’re suited to app dating good for you but most men aren’t going to appear as attractive through the app as they actually are in real life.
nradov
Why not? Is it just a matter of bad photos and poor writing skills?
dvt
> I have never met a romantic partner anywhere but through an app
I mean, okay, I get it, but people have been finding mates for hundreds of thousands of years before apps. People really need to exercise that muscle. Apps are a crutch (and imo a bad one, at that).
scarface_74
For most of that hundreds of thousands of years, mates were arranged and/or the men forced women to mate them. “Love marriages” weren’t a thing and still aren’t the norm in many cultures
paulcole
Read the comment I was replying to closely:
> If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups
"Need" is obviously not true. I generally agree that it is mostly true for friends but I strongly disagree that it is mostly true for romantic partners.
> people have been finding mates for hundreds of thousands of years before apps
People have been doing tons of things before apps. Eating, moving themselves from point a to point b, buying things, etc. I'm not sure your point here.
> Apps are a crutch (and imo a bad one, at that).
Why specifically is this crutch bad?
You would never say that accountants were keeping books for hundreds of years before spreadsheets and that spreadsheets (or Quickbooks or Xero or whatever) are a crutch (and a bad one at that).
null
fragmede
How long has it been since a mass casualty shooting? I'd rather we live in a world where those don't happen, and what we've been doing so far hasn't worked. So while your advice works for some people, unfortunately it doesn't work for everybody. For someone with horribly low esteem/other problems that they've given up, giving them tools to help them get out of that hole so they are able to go out and make friends IRL seems like a win in my book.
MyOutfitIsVague
Mass shootings are significantly rarer than the world (and one's own anxious brain) makes them seem. The risk of dying from a so many other things absolutely dwarf the risk of being shot to death. You're more than twice as likely to die in a car accident than be shot to death. You're more likely to die from an accidental injury than be shot to death by about 10 fold. And that's just for all gun homicides. If you break that down, you're significantly more likely to die by a gun that's shot by yourself, a police officer, or somebody you know than by a stranger. Mass casualty events are even small.
I agree with your point at large, though. The mass shooting panic is a little frustrating when you actually look at the numbers, though. Your risk of dying by gun assault is about 1 in 300, but the risk of dying in a mass shooting is about 1 in 11,000.
arrosenberg
I am giving those people a tool. Find a local sports league, improv group or regular trivia night and start going. It's fine if you only talk to the person working the league or the employees the first couple times - they're paid to talk to you. When muscles atrophy, it's fine to take small steps to make them strong again.
You are far more likely to die driving to work than you are encountering a mass casualty event - that kind of becomes an excuse at some point. If you are really concerned, the biggest targets are large public events and schools (US only), which aren't a great place to work on social anxiety anyways.
BannedUser1
I think his point was that, evidently, trying the same solutions over and over to the mass shooting problem is as futile as giving out the same trite dating advice. Not that he's concerned about joining an improv group due to the risk of mass shootings. We may have found Quinlan's HN account.
only-one1701
There’s a follow-up article to be created here about the modern obsession with comfort/convenience/never feeling challenged or really any negative emotion ever, and generative AI’s interaction with that.
photonthug
Love Scott’s blog and respect his research and science communication efforts. I also think his political outspokenness is important and refreshing, regardless of whether you happen to agree with the guy.
But this was difficult to read, and imho way off the mark. Socially awkward people are very likely to go through life getting called a robot anyway, so I don’t think it’s very helpful to direct them towards robot therapists or robot girlfriends.
slewth
This post makes me pretty sad, dog.
This is not a simulation of a date. It's an interaction with an automated customer service representative. It's someone trying to game out how to be vulnerable and connect with somebody else by volleying stiff dialogue off Samantha Samsung. The idea that this is a "near miss" strains credulity.
I'm getting in a car with my spouse and driving into the hills.
sapphicsnail
What helped me was spending time in groups where I was in the gender minority and also making female friends I wasn't interested in dating. If you're not just looking for sex, it helps to learn a bit of what it's like to be a woman and you're more likely to get that exposure in a space where women feel comfortable. I might be biased because I realized I related to women more than men and transitioned but I see so many sad guys that would make good boyfriends if they got a little more experience being around women.
tcdent
Anxiety is natural.
Learn to confront it and grow through it.
Avoiding uncomfortability is how you all got into this position.
sapphicsnail
It's harder for some people. I used to get panic attacks and shoot out of bed in the middle of the night every time I went to a new social setting. People shaming me for being shy was how it got that big. I've stuck with it and it's a lot easier for me to be social now but it was working through the shame with a therapist, cutting out the toxic people in my life, and challenging myself that did it.
gerdesj
"Since 2015, depressed, isolated, romantically unsuccessful nerdy young guys have regularly been emailing me, asking me for sympathy, support, or even dating advice."
You can be a bit of a well meaning dick (for the US or wanker for en_*), or you can do the right thing.
You do not paint "them" as you have done already. That's not helpful and can only be noted as "victim kicking".
You should point them towards people or organisations that can help or do or say nothing which is better than being unintentionally sarcastically unpleasant.
I am a fan of Scott A and will continue to be but this blog is not the best.
Knowing when to say nothing is just as important as saying something.
hn_throwaway_99
This idea that retreating more and more into virtual worlds is going to help with interactions with actual humans in the real world is pure tech-land insanity.
For some reason a lot of tech people have a problem accepting that the solution to problems largely caused by tech isn't more tech. If you want to be better at interacting with people, go touch grass and interact with more people in the real, physical world.
codr7
Worst idea ever, tech is what killed dating imo.
You don't write requirement specs for partners, because it's evil and because you have no idea what your perfect partner is going to be like until you meet them.
nradov
People aren't robots with technical specifications but there's nothing wrong with having some minimum requirements, as long as you're realistic. Like there's just no way I would have ever been willing to date a woman with a serious mental health condition, regardless of how "perfect" she might have been in other ways. If that makes me evil then so be it.
ohgr
You know what actually helps? Meeting people, going on dates, not being a creepy mofo and actually having something to talk about.
That dialogue is worse than an anime pillow humping discord moderator.
throw310822
Sorry, absolutely off topic, but I just realised that you've never seen Scott Aaronson and Dario Amodei together in the same room, and for a good reason.
christianqchung
No. Betteridge's law. More seriously, while this piece is ancient in AI terms (May 2023), I don't think genuine emotional and social intelligence is something that can be learned at an average level by talking to AI or reading. Using the voice models is a step up from this, but I still think they're too tuned to following your instructions without nuance for something like this. If reading was enough to pick up social and emotional skills, I'd think that people who read the right books would be masters at several trades if it gave even 10% of the experience that real world practice did.
I'm also not trying to be reactionary and dismissive, but how are you supposed to learn social cues from AI right now? In an optimal case, the LLM predicts accurately what would happen. Maybe you could say something awkward and the AI would say back <s/he lets out an exasperated sigh and turns away>; but in real life you have to notice these cues among a barrage of other factors. Would this really help anyone who is this desperate? Additionally, the tone of how you say words matters almost as much as the content, and this is missing from text.
I concede that in extreme cases, some people could learn stuff from trying this, and that's a good thing. I just don't really know how much, who exactly, how, and whether they'd learn incorrect stuff as well.
Nope, it almost certainly won't. If you want to make friends and meet a partner you need to join groups. Pick ones where you will see the same people regularly and make a lot of small talk. Small talk is where the magic happens, so have some hobbies and interesting stories to contribute. You gotta practice, that's the only way it gets easier.
I fully acknowledge society makes it hard, and it won't happen for you unless you make it. Join a coed sports team or start going to the same trivia night every week. The rest kind of figures itself out.