My friend is working on a new dating app, and I'm not sure how I feel about it

Throwaway because I have a public account my friend knows about.

I'm a female AI researcher at a top Canadian university (I work in computer vision), and my good friend (we work in the same lab) is working on an app that basically "coaches" men and women on how to send "better" texts to people they're romantically interested in as a side project of his.

For example, if it detects that your message is too long (say a page long) or if it's really angry or negative, it highlights that portion of the message before you send it, and gives you feedback.

It learns from experience so if it finds that certain types of texts (say, those with angry emojis) are received poorly, it coaches people not to do that.

I want to support him but I'm really not sure if I should. I change my mind on this a lot - on the one hand, helping people be less weird/creepy over text seems good but OTOH it seems kind of strange to have computers "coach" us on how to text each other, almost like that black mirror episode.

I'm honestly so conflicted.

What should I do?

Posted Feb 17, 2017, 2:52 AM UTC

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