Ashley Madison: how much AI do you need to trick a horny man?
As more and more details emerge in the wake of the theft and online publication of data from the Ashley Madison dating site, we’re not just learning about the company’s questionable practices, but also about how humans interact with technology. Beyond making value judgments about the sex lives of the site’s users, what all this really invites us to do is reflect on more complex issues, such as using virtual environments in the search for pleasure or to meet other needs.
Gizmodo’s first analyses of the affair concluded, as have others, that the company’s value proposition, captured in its slogan, (“Life is short. Have an affair.”) appealed overwhelmingly to men, and inconsequence, there were barely any real women in the database. This bias is further expressed through the platform’s design is openly sexist, with echoes of those sorts of bars where men have to pay, but women get in for free: in fact, men had to pay to answer messages on the site, while women could do so for free.
Responding to Gizmodo’s research revealing that the number of men using the site far outnumbered women, and the vast majority of those women listed as members had never used it, the company released a press statement denying the conclusions, saying that plenty of women used the service, that it wasn’t a scam, and that in fact it was expanding fast as a result of the publication of data. In essence, Ashley Madison works on the basis that there is no such thing as bad publicity: even when that publicity is telling the world that the site’s security and business practices are an absolute disaster.
But the question goes further: a new Gizmodo’s analysis, which is fascinating stuff, reveals that not only did not very many women use it, but that the company had created a legion of female bots to encourage male users to open a pay account. These so-called engagers were programs designed to have simple conversations with men, using protocols to record interactions and avoid repetition, and designed to excite users to the point that they would be prepared to continue the dialogue. The huge imbalance between men and women was not just because there were so few female users, but also because Ashley Madison programmed its bots to engage only with men, who were charged for using the service.
Creating a service whereby millions of men are paying for fictitious conversations with women is no small thing, and certainly provides food for thought. For example, anybody who opened an Ashley Madison account and actually ended up having an affair with a real person should be very proud of themselves, because even accepting that the initial idea of the founder really was to facilitate these kinds of encounters, the service had deteriorated into something completely different.
The second question this raises is to what extent chatting with a bot counts as cheating on your partner. There is a big difference between leaping into and out of bed with a range of married women and sitting in front of a computer talking to a computer program pretending to be a desirable woman. The fact that so many men were prepared to hand over their credit card details on the basis of these conversations suggests that Ashley Madison’s programmers had beaten the Turing test. Or were those bots only required to simulate a few standard messages that the desperate male recipients interpreted as coming from a real woman? We may need to redefine the Turing test when it comes to confront artificial intelligence with the intelligence of horny men…
Needless to say, it’s not really possible to draw any firm conclusions here, and it is more than possible that some of what has been said in the media is mistaken or based on interactions with bots rather than the presumed interactions between real people, but doing so is still an interesting exercise. It is hard to imagine that an application available in more than 50 countries and that according to the company had risen to number 14 in terms of turnover would base most of its activities on programs simulating women looking for an affair, unless of course we are talking about a new breakthrough in artificial intelligence.
At the same time, if the service really was a major scam, along the lines of the scene in Minority Report where people are engaged in virtual activities, whether taking part in an orgy or being acclaimed by the masses, this would shed some light on why the company’s CEO has stepped down, as well as on the blackmail that some users have been subjected to as a result of being in Ashley Madison’s database. Although quite how you can blackmail somebody for chatting with bots in front of your computer isn’t clear. Unless of course infidelity can be separated from the physical. Is there such a thing as “virtual” infidelity, which can be measured against “real” infidelity?
Everything would seem to suggest that some or most of the men who used the Ashley Madison site were in fact simply chatting with bots, which puts them in the category of porn consumers, or who play some kind of game with a sexual component. How about a similar service run along the lines of a game, designed to satisfy similar instincts?
One thing the whole Ashley Madison affair has shown is that when it comes to men and machines, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
(En español, aquí)
