Digital Adam & Eve

Or, the most horrifying use of AI yet

Writing an essay is a lot like falling in love. You can have the best intentions in the world, and everything can make perfect logical sense, but you just can’t make it happen. Then other times, all it takes is some sheer dumb luck and everything falls into place.

In both writing and love, I am more often the former than the latter. I have essays that I started writing in early 2023 that I still haven’t finished. I’ve put in so much work on them and they make so much sense but, just like me and the young lady I thought was my soulmate when I was 23, they just don’t work. Meanwhile, this essay was just an idea floating in my head and then one day, with a stroke of luck, something happened that made it all come together, just like… well, okay, I don’t have a love one here, but seemingly lots of other people do. Fun fact: no fewer than four women have made plans of a romantic nature with me and then those plans fell through because they met their husband.¹ As the French say, lucky in cards, unlucky in love.

This essay, however, is the result of dumb luck. It is also, like how two people come together to form something greater, a combination. It is a combination of two articles I’ve already written. And it is the combination of two missives² I’ve received.

The first to set into motion this beautiful embrace of words was from a young lady I know talking about a news story I had already seen. It was a story I found quite interesting because it was about what I consider the finest article I ever wrote, Bumble in the Jungle.³

In addition to being a Certified Banger, it effectively set out my views on the flaws with online dating. This is, perhaps, my favorite thing I’ve ever written here:

But I think if we take one more step back the problem with online dating becomes even more fundamental. In the pre-dating days, coupling was arranged mainly by parents whose goal was to maximize the business part of this arrangement. Then dating came along and we gave way to no one having a hand on the wheel. Look at that list of sources: bars, schools, and offices all have one thing in common: they’re not trying to set people up. Dating was in the hands of randomness, with all its brutality and beauty.  Once we moved to online dating, we put coupling into the hands of a for-profit venture.

As someone who has been on the brutality side of that more than the beauty side,⁴ I understand why those exposed to the brutality turn to any matchmaker available. I, of course, am a man prone to contentment and respect for the divine order. I will not fly too close to the sun, steal fire from Olympus, or download Hinge. If God wishes for me to have a mate, then, like Adam, I shall be provided one. Yet, for those who believe the good Lord helps those who help themselves, there is no more popular tool than the hellish dating apps. And those tools are about to get a whole lot more hellish.

Founder and former CEO of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd (an internally combustible name if ever one existed), made some statements back in May that were, for lack of a better term, horrifying. I would recommend reading the entire article.

A large portion of it is dedicated to using AI to lie.⁵ Dating is, by its nature, inherently dishonest. People wish to hide what they consider less desirable about themselves, and we all do it to a degree. I don’t show women pictures from the time I went to WrestleMania on our first date. Perhaps more seriously, I once dated a young lady who, after I was well and truly in love with her, told me she suffered from borderline personality disorder and would one day just stop liking me. She was right. As she said, if she told me at the outset, I probably wouldn’t have dated her. I like to think she was wrong but, all counterfactuals are fantasies. And although that is perhaps an extreme example, for as long as dating has existed, people have tried to hide that which they feel most insecure about in the hopes that at a certain point, it won’t matter. And it usually works! 

Online dating takes that logic to its extreme and illogical conclusion.⁶ The first online date I ever went on – and this was 11 years ago, practically a time of wine and roses compared to today – the very first thing my date said was “I can’t believe you’re actually six feet tall.” This comment required explanation. Apparently, as this site required you to put in your height, it was quite common that men under 6’ – sometimes by quite a large margin! – would use 6’ as their height, so much so that savvy women assumed this was a lie. This seemed foolish, as much like with a fake picture, the lie would be realized instantly. But my date assured me that she had often been on dates with men who were noticeably under six feet tall, as short as 5’6” which is just mind-boggling. I could not then – nor can I now – fathom why they thought this was an effective strategy. Also, when I got home I changed my height to 6’1” – a lie, yes, but a lie in order to protect the truth.

Yet, the Stygian nightmare I endured in online dating⁷ is nothing compared to the AI dominated hellscape it has become. And although I’m sure an AI written bio couldn’t possibly be worse than the incredibly repetitive NPC bios I saw in the day,⁸ those were at least true. Now, people are having AIs create their bio for them to create a fake person. It seems like just changing who you are would be easier. People use ChatGPT to write and respond to messages. What are we even doing here at this point? If you can’t hold a conversation with someone, what possible point could there be to dating them?

But none of that compares to the dystopian future Ms. Wolfe Herd has in mind for the poor bastards who can’t meet someone through chance:

“There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierge ... and then you don’t have to talk to 600 people,” she says.

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The first missive I referred to came from a young lady whom, unfortunately, is quite a bit smarter than your humble interlocutor. Her very name is wisdom. When she referred to this as a Digital Adam & Eve, my mind could process the words but not the idea. And although I am sure that I am still incapable of understanding her point, this floated around in my head until a missive I received two weeks ago.

This one came from an ex-girlfriend of mine. She was having lunch with a friend and decided she was going to introduce us because she thinks we’d hit it off. When I pointed out that this was a silly idea as we lived in different time zones, her response was that love knows no boundaries. When I asked why her explanation was that I should trust her, she is great at playing matchmaker and introduced two couples that are currently engaged.

Although that explanation, much like the logic behind this,⁹ was lacking it was the stroke of luck I needed to help this essay come together. Because this triggered the question of why people try and play matchmaker. And although I’m sure all of you who have done it were motivated solely by the most altruistic intentions – by the very fact of your subscribing I know you’re truly virtuous – I doubt that is universal. Thankfully, since with one exception (Hi Alec!) no one I know in the meatspace reads this newsletter, I can write this without fear of my friend being offended. She is not the type of person who acts out of selflessness. And when I thought back on all the times me or my other single friends have been setup, it is also rarely by people I would think of as the Mother Teresa sort. Which makes sense, because if you think about it, matchmaking is an incredibly powerful activity. If you are successful, you are influencing people’s lives at a fundamental level. You are changing their destiny, creating something new – a couple – where once only individuals existed. You are, effectively, playing God.

This essay is essentially a series of clunky segues, but this one is to setup the second old essay I’m revisiting. I’m usually not a fan of my own writing but there was a three month stretch in 2022 when I was regularly churning out bangers and perhaps the most underrated of them is Playing God.

The conceit behind that – oh man, I just reread it to type this sentence and I turned “Musk discourse” into “Muskourse” and do you realize how lucky you are getting this for free? – was that the push to make humanoid robots is dumb and the only good justification is an innate desire to play God. As I said in that piece:

A writer with far more skill and time than I have could write an excellent piece about how an increasingly atheistic West has managed to internalize Christianity to an impressive degree.

Unfortunately, in the near two years since then, I have not become blessed with more skill or time. If anything, I have less of both. So, although I cannot elaborate it, I will gladly expand upon it. Almost every civilization was based upon belief in the divine. Almost all of them had some creation myth. Many of those creation myths are strikingly similar. To take it even further, the last fourteen centuries of Western Civilization were dominated by two religions that have an almost identical creation myth. It does not matter how much we downgrade or reject religion – especially in tech – these are things that exist in our root system. A generation or two of atheism does not make them disappear.

To step back further, the Greeks were quite concerned with playing god (uncapitalized, in this case). Or, more precisely, with overreaching. Humans were to respect the divine order, and not overreach or become too ambitious. There’s a reason that even a poor student should come out of a course on Greek mythology and literature knowing what hubris means. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas, although believing in a less numerous but also less capricious deity, set centuries of theology by writing about the importance of adherence to the divine order. But belief in natural law is passe.

Yet, that’s not to say that playing God – in the sense I used the term then and now – is necessarily bad. That older essay was, essentially, a meditation on the idea of creation. Thus, why here I speak of the universality of belief in divine creation. We all aspire to, in some way, create. Whether it’s creating a child, creating a meal,¹⁰ creating a work of art, creating an essay, creating a couple, or creating a world-changing artificial intelligence, it’s all creation. It’s all emulation of the divine. And this has always been considered virtuous. The problem in the story of the Tower of Babel is not building a tower, it’s building a tower to the heavens. And… wait a second, did I type “create a world-changing artificial intelligence” in that last bit?!

In love, as in writing essays, timing is everything. Much like the young lady with whom I was enraptured by both her brains and beauty, but beguiled by the existence of her boyfriend, who reached out to me to tell me she was single… after I had moved to Texas. But also like the article entitled In Defense of Mark Zuckerberg that I wrote in my head while returning a rental car to Raleigh in April 2023, defending a much reviled figured in technology, that I never published only to see him become perhaps the most beloved tech founder.

Now, if we’re being honest, I still think he’s a bit of a try hard. But I also find the things he has to say increasingly interest, and I think this snippet here is worth watching:

The Greeks would be shocked at the extent of playing god going on lately, much of which is tied up in AI. And much of it is tied up in the belief – that I personally consider fallacious – that consciousness can be created. But Zuck is correct, this is much more complicated than many people wish to admit. I acknowledge that to a specific type of materialist, the question of consciousness is just one of computing power. But I am skeptical of that belief. Yet, the belief that we can build something smarter than ourselves persists.

And why shouldn’t it? We have harnessed Promethean fire and can fly as close to the sun as we want. The fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil has been well and truly plucked, digitized, and is now editable. We overthrew the divine order and created our own, why shouldn’t we try and create an intelligence even greater than our own?

Longtime readers (Hi Erin) will note that this was far more personal and confessional than I typically write. I enjoy essays like my last one – about how much movie theaters suck – where I tackle a small topic, make some jokes, throw in some Elder Millenial pop culture references, and call it a day. But at the end of the day, that’s stuff that an AI can do. I’m not kidding, watch:

An AI-powered dating app might sound like a Silicon Valley dream, but it's more like a scene straight out of "The Matrix" where Mr. Anderson swipes left on reality. Imagine an algorithm trying to decode the complexities of human emotions—it’s like asking Clippy from Microsoft Word to proofread a Shakespearean sonnet. Instead of romantic candlelit dinners, you'd get a digital assistant suggesting Taco Bell because it detected a 12% match in your mutual love for late-night snacks. Remember the 90s, when love was just a mixtape of Soul Asylum and Alanis Morissette? Now, an AI might think "Ironic" is a feature, not a song. In the end, what’s love if not a little chaotic, a touch unpredictable, and beyond the reach of even the most sophisticated code?

Wow, nailed it. See, it can do me. I had to change The Backstreet Boys to Soul Asylum because it’s a better reference, but that was otherwise dead on. But what it can’t do is have real emotion. It never experienced the romantic agony of my lost loves, or the creative misery of laboring over an idea you can’t quite find a way to express. Does that come through in my words? I don’t know, but I can at least try, and it’s at least honest. A being without consciousness cannot. Because it is missing something fundamental.

My ex-girlfriend’s valiant attempt to play matchmaker failed because trying to set anyone up is really hard. That’s leaving aside trying to set me up, which is like playing CFB25 on Heisman difficulty. Getting two human beings to form a relationship is incredibly difficult. But along comes Bumble – and, I’m sure, countless others – who are trying to create an artificial intelligence that will manage to do what humans cannot, and do it at scale.

That last part is key for, as I always say, the scale at which digital communications allows things to be done is staggering. Part of the problem with Bumble and its ilk is that due to its immense reach it has managed to poison dating for generations of people, even those who don’t use it. Digital Adam & Eve is not implausible. If such an AI could exist, it would quickly be responsible for creating millions of matches. Thinking that you could create a super-intelligence capable of pairing the world is the height of hubris, but Venus has lost her power to strike it down.

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Love, like writing an essay, starts full of fire and ends in a confusing mess. Like the girlfriend I had who swears she broke up with me but didn’t and I spent four months assuming we were just a couple who never saw each other, this essay is going to end without clarity. Because when I first wrote this in my head, I had a brilliant ending, which went as follows:

The ultimate problem with creating Digital Adam and Eve is that it will just never be possible. Love and consciousness are both mysteries. Despite the attempts of our greatest minds, we still don’t really know what consciousness is, or how it is created, so how can we be expected to create it ourselves? And despite the attempts of essentially all our poets and artists, we still don’t really know what love is, or how it is created, so how can we be expected to create it ourselves?

Love is, for all its flaws, truly amazing. Partially because it is inexplicable. An AI, lacking consciousness, is not going to be able to understand the emotional nuance and depth of love, possess the empathy or intuition or insight to understand when it can blossom, or have the experience of love itself. Sometimes all it takes is meeting someone once to fall in love. Sometimes it takes time, as love blossoms out of friendship. Sometimes it is – paradoxically – both of these. Sometimes it is none. It is a mystery that humans can grasp but not understand.

What people like Ms. Wolfe Herd are proposing is not, in fact, a being capable of creating Digital Adam and Eve. They are proposing a fancier spreadsheet. They do not need the gods to strike them down for hubris, they will fail on their own.

Cool ending, bro. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it contradicts everything I’ve written. We can’t create Digital Adam & Eve because it wouldn’t be successful? So what? I have spilled endless amounts of hypothetical ink on the deluge of subpar products that the last two decades have spawned. The promise of the Digital Revolution has given way to the Reign of Terror. We are the Old Bolsheviks being executed by AirBnBs, no breakfast but added chores. We are the Girondins, our necks falling under the guillotine of shitty streaming services. So why would an inability of Tinderdite to make good matches keep it from being popular? It is entirely possible that in ten years, most people will be matching off of an AI. “Well, I guess the AI says we’re supposed to be together.”

Yet, I don’t like this ending either. I am, afterall, an incorrigible optimist. It’s literally in the name of this newsletter. I do think a sizable amount of people will let their “AI dating concierge” talk to other AIs and go on dates based off that. And I am sure that will create some happy couples because love is completely unpredictable. But I prefer to think that this will help hasten the demise of this awful moment in our history. Because here’s the thing: the Digital Revolution should be giving us a Golden Age of dating, and it will. What that will look like I do not know. But I know it will be when we, beings with consciousness and capable of love, use these great tools for our ends.  

1. This does not count the young lady who broke up with her boyfriend, started seeing me, and then accidentally ran into him a mere two blocks away from where she would’ve run into me at the same time, leading to them reconciling and marrying. I don’t count that one because we didn’t have concrete plans.

2. I’m now referring to text messages as missives. It sounds classier that way. Feel free to use it yourself.

3. It’s a play on words of a Jethro Tull song. People need to be more pumped about that.

4. In that essay I eschewed sharing my own dating stories. This is the overcorrection.

5. These three paragraphs are essentially a long tangent but what a tangent.

6. This is not about the plethora of bots, fake profiles, and catfishing on these apps. Those are just good old fashioned vile people.

7. This is an overstatement for the purpose of keeping the theme of Hell alive, but as I stated in the previous article, my online dating experiences would best be described as limited but satisfactory.

8. There were a lot of Pams looking for their Jim and a lot of talk about passports. Unless your travel involves taking the One Ring to Mordor, it should not be the basis of your personality.

9. I wish I could tell you, dear reader, that this led to a blossoming love. But if it had, it would be at the end of the essay, because I understand narrative structure. It leading to a few text messages being exchanged and nothing else means it goes in the middle.

10. My use of this clip from The Bear will seem odd if you don’t read the footnotes but I just binge watched all three seasons and it’s the best show on television and anyone who didn’t tell me to watch it owes me an apology. Part of what I love is the way it makes the creation of these dishes so beautiful - as seen in this clip - and anyone who has obsessed over creating something will find themselves in this show.