I have a somewhat analogous experience that proves to me this could plausibly work.
A few years ago I was single and met a guy at 'da club' who was visiting just for the weekend from .au. We hit it off and hung out while he was in SF until he flew home (to his husband, they were in an open relationship.. I know complicated). Note: This initial physical chemistry is the part that a "service" may never be able to replicate, and might be a necessary pre-condition for many.
But... for the next 6 months or so while I was stressed out, single, and building a startup, I got relief by texting him all the time. I called him my fake boyfriend at the time, even to my friends! I got a lot of the same support/companionship I needed purely virtually that I'd normally get from a real relationship. And because he was married it could never get too 'real,' but the role he played for me was real.
Many people go through hard times alone, and all the business/friend/family/therapist networks in the world can't replicate the role of a romantic partner. If the personality is real and is compatible, and the conversations have memory, then I think a synthetic partner is a beautiful thing for people who need it most.
Huh, that's funny. I've had the same kind of relationship with a woman for the last 2 years, though we dated for a relatively (for me) long time after my divorce. She has kept in touch after I moved. Only recently, I think she is finally ready to "move on" so I've backed off 100%.
It's true. Having someone who cares about you with whom you can relieve personal stress is meaningful. She definitely did that for me, and I hope I did that for her.
On the other hand, I wonder if it has always been like this or there is something unique to our current societal configuration causing the need for these synthetic partnerships.
I don't think that gives you the same kind of support. A crush you don't FaceTime/text/whatever multiple times a day for an extended period of time. And if you had to hide your feelings then there's no relief.
OA quote: ""lower league English football" wasn't available"
Possibly explains the recurring need for a fake one.
Serious contribution: bots faking it with other bots generating large numbers of apparently real social profiles. Not just gf/bf whatever but other forms of relationship (fake boss asking for more work this weekend as a cover for...).
I think if you're going to undertake large-scale chaffing of the internet, it'd be way more fun to target the future rather than the present.
Don't just create a hundred million fake profiles with their own social networks: try to create alternate timelines. Profiles on social networks, emails, instant messages, dating profiles, recontextualized and faked photographs, websites and DNS entries and forums, all supporting an alternate timeline, smushed as thoroughly as possible into the internet.
Don't just try to confuse current surveillance states, try to confuse future historians!
I ran a website like that, it was all scammers. On both sides. I left because I didn't want my name attached, but it organically attracted both scummy type 1 users and scummy type 2 users, where both were necessary for interaction to take place.
EDIT: I should add that I wasn't made fully aware of the depth of the scamminess of the whole thing until I accidentally tried cleaning up some "offers" and found it was all scummy offers to scummy counterparties.
The scams were hardcore; yes; and no. No fake social interactions, it was actually just scammers trying to get people to order goods on the pretense they would then ship them to Buenos Aires, for example. That example, oh man, I couldn't believe how sketchy, how beyond sketchy, that website was. Or is.
It wouldn't be too hard for the surveillance society to distinguish the real profiles and bots(Edit: or people pretending to be different people).
The US Government has built up such far reaching surveillance tools, of which we have just seen the tip of the iceberg, that this chaff that you are talking about wouldn't be chaff at all.
Maybe. But the thing is that they're going after everything. Add some hot key words. Back in the day, we used sigs for our Usenet posts that were loaded with hot keywords.
Anyway, this would cost real money, for sure. But the labor supply for fake friends is huge, especially if you don't care about proficiency in English.
Edit: For example, one could generate numerous fake Russian acquaintances of Edward Snowden, and have each buy a few fake friends. Maybe the fake friends would be impressed ;)
When someone suggests rolling their own crypto a bunch of people pop up to point out the considerable risks.
We need the same for these "wheat / chaff" steganographic noise generation schemes. Steganography is probably secure, but people tend to vastly underestimate the amount of cover material needed.
Considerable money and time has been devoted to "finding the real signal".
The Usenet keyword triggers were trivially easy to filter. Mostly because people just put a list, in all caps, at the end of their post.
We know these are trivially easy to filter because putting a list like [ECHELON CIA NSA GCHQ IRA BOMB inurl:groups.google.com] returns loads. Here's one example, with the handy words "anti echelon block" https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/uk.media/KqhWP1rLF9U/G...
Well, based on inspection of content, maybe. But we're not talking about mere words as an expression thought.
The simple fact is that within U.S. borders alone, there are maybe 300 million animals, each weighing in at probably 150 lbs (75kg) or more. They drive cars visible from space. They flip light switches on and off wherever they go. They clock in at work. They clock out. They walk in front of cameras, and there are cameras dotting every place of business, and in homes and outdoors. They plug things in and then unplug them. They power on machinery. They use credit card terminals. They visit ATMs. They buy things in cash, with serial numbered currency, which passes through more optical scanners than you might guess. And almost everyone speaks English, exclusively.
And then there are the mobile devices, the uniquely identifiable radio beacons we've, almost all of us, have volunteered to be tagged with.
So, VPNs, and proxies, and TOR, as much as they do, are only going to go so far.
Your assuming competence. The surveillance state is built by the lowest bidder and is far far less useful than generally assumed.
Just look into false positives on the no fly list. Sure, it's slightly better than random chance, but odds are if you pick an name from that list they are a non threat. (It's far worse than that you can probably pick several names before finding a real issue.)
Depends on how you define accuracy. Your thinking in terms of the test for the no fly list is X accurate, but that does not mean the no fly list it's self has X accuracy. List A, contains every person on the planet so it's comprehensive, but nobody would call that an accurate no fly list. List B contains one name of an terrorist who has made specific credible and recent threats, it is very accurate.
I think what's really being alluded to is that regardless of your accuracy (unless it's 0% or 100%), your false-positives will always be subject to your inputs.
Put another way, if you have no terrorists going through, then your false positive matches will always be greater than or equal to your positive matches, and in this case, equal only when they are both zero, since there would never be a real positive.
In a less extreme case, such as the reality we live in, we have many millions of non-terrorists and a few terrorists, and even with three nines of accuracy, it's likely your false positive matches far outweigh your real positive matches.
Even now, it wouldn't be hard to pipe one fake friend to another. Add some delay and rate limiting. Route it through your Tor relay, VPN service, or whatever.
That's romantic comedy stuff. Both sides believe they've hired a bot but have been secretly matched and are just talking to each other, to save costs. They are really happy with the "relationship" they have with the "bot". When they find out, they are outraged and sue the company...
Basshunter (the artist) is famously geeky, another of his song's is "Vi sitter i Ventrilo och spelar DotA" ("We're sitting in Ventrilo, playing DotA". If I remember correctly he performed at some gaming/esports event like DreamHack a few years ago, too.
Haha, was that about this? 'Boten' sounds like 'boat' (and the Dutch equivalent, 'boot'), and so we had a cover in our language about someone who had a 'really beautiful boat' called Anna.
With his accent, it is the same in Swedish. Combined with the song playing way too much in commercial radio, it created some resentment. Someone on a festival had a sign saying "You have a boat up your ass".
Tell Alma, "The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping."
Hard to believe that movie is three and a half decades old.
Speaking of replicants getting interviewed by HR, another possible profitable relationship simulator, "The HR interview simulator" asking both classics such as "Can you describe how you solved a work or school problem?" and "What bugs you about coworkers or bosses?" and for an additional $10/month it adds "Mr Neckbeard McNed" to the conversation, who asks you to explain various algos randomly drawn from the Book of Knuth. "So I see you're applying to be a web page designer ... css, check, jquery experience, check, no Fields Medal or Nobel, thats something we kinda require here for writing our CRUD app, preferably both, but maybe we can make an exception just for you ... I was wondering if you could psuedocode the Hopcroft-Karp bipartite algorithm on the whiteboard for me. No pressure, I'll give you a minute or two. Or you can write it in Haskell, 6502 assembly, or APL, whichever you'd prefer."
Bot talks to Bot talking to bot thinking bot is not bot but is actually bot. Bot is also talking to bot thinking it is not bot but is actually bot. Both bots find out Bot is bot but not bot. Both Bots bot. The net Bot is bot net. Bot-ception.
"When they find out, they are outraged and sue the company..."
So knowing this possibility, write a disclaimer first! A generic one of course, that won't rise awareness in (the unlikely) case your clients actually bother to read something before signing up!
I used to work in the phone industry. If you're allowing users to message each other you need human moderators, otherwise you'll get death threats and bizarre fantasies carefully worded to get around any automated filter. If you're going to pay a human to read every message you might as well pay them to write them, it takes a similar amount of time and usually means better service.
"Moderated dating" is an interesting idea by itself.
Where both sides have to conform to a very strict etiquette (platform rules), until they both decide to move their relationship to next level anyway. I can see how it can appeal to some people.
I think a chaperone is primarily a safeguard against indiscretions. Their raison d'etre is to make sure nobody damages the goods before you have decided on a suitable match for your daughter. Which I find rather archaic.
One of the problems with this is that platforms have an incentive to use the platform rules for monetization - for example, by charging per message and restricting the ability to bypass the platform.
I remember an interesting piece on the OKCupid blog where they said that they'd blanked out profile pictures for a special event (so people had to just look at what each other had written), and people who went on dates during that event rated their dates much higher.
All dating sites are moderated, to some degree. At least the mainstream ones. I can't think of one where you start by posting your home phone and address and full name.
You start by sending messages, establish a relationship. Then you elevate it to messaging/calling via other platforms or real world meetings at your own pace.
It's not for concealing that you're a dick (well, it could be), it's more for protecting you from who knows how many people with who knows what intentions. It's not a guarantee, but it's a filter that works fairly well.
How could this protect anyone from anything worse than the occasional verbal abuse? Real bad people with real bad intentions will most certainly not be frustrated by some automatic word filter or a ban on dick pics. They will probably be the /last/ ones to do anything obviously fishy. You just can't be a sneaky bastard luring in innocent victims and an obvious prick at the same time. Unless you are doing some amazingly charismatic virtuoso double bluffing, I suppose. Or you're just looking for a willing victim looking for a perp. I think the whole idea is beyond stupid.
No question that this holds if humans know that they are talking to other humans. But do you think the same is true for humans who think they talk to bots?
Dunno why people are surprised that (straight) women are interested in boyfriends as well. Plus or minus a percentage or two, there are as many single women as single men, and they face many similar family/societal pressures to be involved with someone (if not more due to the eventual biological timebomb). Partners are not commodities, and it's way better for women to be single than to have the wrong partner.
I think I'll get downvoted for this, esp. on HN, but I think the main surprise people have with this kind of thing (+ what you're missing out with the comparison to men frankly) is the significant biological difference between men and women - it's far, far easier for a woman to find a male partner than vice-versa. Generally, women choose.
In history 40% of all men have reproduced, while 80% of all women have. It's just biology.
So it's surprising they couldn't find this in real life. Additionally, women tend to have better support networks than men.
Of course, this doesn't mean it's easy to find a decent guy, and yes, partners are not commodities, so maybe that is the real issue while still wanting some companionship.
And it's not just way better for _women_ to be single than to have the wrong partner, it's way better for a person to be single than to have the wrong partner.
Made an account just to post this.
I used to follow a columnist called Jann Burner.
That's what he wrote on the subject:
```
And now, a closer look at what is to be in store for us. Computers will become totally voice activated mimetic devices cued to their owner so no one else will be able to activate them. The good ones will not even be deceived by a recording of their owner’s voice. They will “seem” to become attached and will be able to pick up subtle clues that will be undetectable by technicians. Somehow (no one will be quite sure how) they will be able to tell the real from the Memorex. They will be able to read “stress” levels in their owner’s voice and eye like an attentive pet. “What’s wrong John? Have an especially difficult day?” Wireless wearables will become the style. No keyboard, no mouse, no monitor. The hardware will be comprised of two parts: a small pager like device which will attach to the belt and a headband with a small fiber optic cable which will twist gracefully around the face and project the full computer image directly onto the retina of the eye. The ultimate “head’s up display”.
Websites will have come a long way. People will go from designing personal web pages and Facebook entries to personal virtual reality sites. Places you will be able to hang out in. Places friends will be able to visit, the ultimate private club or salon. Some will be free floating and move like the frequency of a cell phone, never to be in the same place twice. Others will be so solid they will be constructed over generations and handed down from father to son, mother to daughter. Like cybernetic jewelry. Creations in cyberspace will be an investment.
Eventually people will begin to put their memories of their lives on their sites. At first they will be like a grand photo-album, but then things will get more complicated. People will begin to journal their memories (cleaned up and detuned or exaggerated). This will be called their Book Of Life and when you fall in love or become very close with someone you will share your “Book of Life”. You will go to their past (as they remember it or as they want it to be remembered) which is not to say that that is how it really was, but then, that is another story. In the end, who cares? The motto of the day will be,”Intention is Everything”.
Some people will constantly hang out in their own Memory Palaces. Some will call this Cyber-Porn. Masturbatory! With some people, taking a walk through their Book of Life will be like a walk through a very cultured and cluttered museum. With others it will be a walk in a park. With still others, you might not want to walk through their Book alone, without a guide and without protection. And especially not at night, even Cyber-Night. It might resemble a cross between Times Square, New Year’s Eve 1999, and a car crash in progress with everything happening at once and yet with all the separate incidents frozen in time, to be savored later, like the left-overs from a frozen dinner. From a Jeffery Dhamer buffet.
Some people will actually hire others to design their sites, so it will be dramatic or pretty or impressively chic. Beware of anyone who has someone else design their Book of Life.
Some people will get so caught up they will actually begin to live in their book and they will get stuck somewhere between their restructured memory of a past and their fantasy imagining of a future. Their real life simply will become a maintenance site for their bio-computer, a place to sleep, fuel the body, take a dump and sweat, so that the mind might remain healthy, so as to allow them to really live and move through their silicon/crystal version of consciousness, through their Book of Life…their Memory Palace. Their perfect place to be where no wind blows. The center of the cyclone. This will be more addictive than any drug.
```
See more at: http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/column.php?id=143352
$15 a month per subscriber; surely one person can write hundreds of messages and maintain dozens of personalities a month, especially when aided by some text recognition and pointers ("your personality with this customer is 'nerdy', suggested replies: 'Dr. Who is the shit!', 'ia! ia!', 'bush did 9/11'"). I don't know what the average income in the US is, but with a hundred subscribers per person you'd be looking at about $1500 / month, which sounds decent.
It also depends on how much messages you get though; I'm sure there's a few that will just chat all day to fill up a need for social contact, while others will just message a few times a month to keep up appearances. Of course, as 'girlfriend' you could (and probably should) do some flood control yourself (max x messages / day / person) to be able to keep up with as many clients as possible.
I'm familiar with the company and believe they use Amazon's Mechanical Turk. There's a hard cap on the number of messages per month, so that ensures they stay profitable.
This has been going on in MMORPG's for years, at least there it's a bit more up-front and transparent. And people can do other things to pass the time while they wait for the fake girlfriend to login. :)
A few years ago I was single and met a guy at 'da club' who was visiting just for the weekend from .au. We hit it off and hung out while he was in SF until he flew home (to his husband, they were in an open relationship.. I know complicated). Note: This initial physical chemistry is the part that a "service" may never be able to replicate, and might be a necessary pre-condition for many.
But... for the next 6 months or so while I was stressed out, single, and building a startup, I got relief by texting him all the time. I called him my fake boyfriend at the time, even to my friends! I got a lot of the same support/companionship I needed purely virtually that I'd normally get from a real relationship. And because he was married it could never get too 'real,' but the role he played for me was real.
Many people go through hard times alone, and all the business/friend/family/therapist networks in the world can't replicate the role of a romantic partner. If the personality is real and is compatible, and the conversations have memory, then I think a synthetic partner is a beautiful thing for people who need it most.