Sick of dredging through fruitless photo after fruitless photo on Tinder? Look no further: Saurabh Datta, a graduate student at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, has created a robot that can identify matches tailored to the preferences of a user of the dating/hook up app.
Called the Conditional Lover, the bot uses a camera to scan faces that appear on the typical phone screen. After registering a profile picture, it then "selects or rejects with [...] two prongs like [humans] do with their fingers." All preferences are preselected, "preferences" being within an aesthetic context, not a personality-centric one.
"It takes those as conditions set by you and performs actions based on the extracted information from the images of girls. It is intentionally enabled not to learn but just to act," Datta wrote on her website.
There is a deeper meaning behind the development of Conditional Lover on a philosophical level. "This piece is an 'interpretation' over a belief that all those tasks which doesn't need human dexterity will eventually be delegated to machines," Datta explained. "And following up on the morphosis of AI and software bots, really a question of agency remains blurry."
There's a bit of irony to it all: in an interview with Motherboard, Datta confessed that she herself is not a Tinder user. "I actually don't use a smartphone. I borrowed one from a colleague. He ran it on his profile and eventually went to two dates after running it for half an hour ... He didn't even tell me ..." she said.
Check out the Conditional Lover in the video below.
Via Motherboard
