Your robot charm doesn’t work on me

The parameters of the experiment were rigid, and the goal was simple: How many women could he make fall in love with a robot?

Everything about his dating persona was fully him except the words. He used his own pictures and was good-looking, handsome even, with a striking smile. He didn’t lie about his height (5'10"). Saying he was any taller would have biased the results.

Elements of what he wrote were true. The real man carried a leather-bound journal on all his travels, but he didn’t write that profile line himself. And maybe, just maybe, talking about antiquated, pen-to-paper communication would make the experiment feel more real.

He was a CX Experience Specialist for the military. He matched with her, a User Experience Designer working on AI frameworks. But after all, he matched with everyone. It was experiment protocol.

She messaged him first, saying she carried a journal with her everywhere too and that his profile made her think of an Oscar Wilde quote.

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”

Behind the facade of his carefully crafted profile lines, she saw him. In that moment, he knew she was more than a subject in his experiment.

Per protocol, every message he entered every message she sent into a large language model to generate a response. The military hoped to use the results to sway public opinion in their favor—individually, one-by-one, systematically.After all, who wouldn’t do anything for love, right?

She suspected it was AI almost immediately but couldn’t be certain. The emotional depth attracted her, and the subtle, soul-deep compliments made her feel seen. She let it continue, strategically asking questions to suss out the truth.

After a few days, she confronted him bluntly. “I value directness and specificity in communication. I suspect you’ve been using AI to message me, and we are not a match.”

He had been falling in love with her.

She told him how she was in the middle of three books: one filled with mystic poetry, a murder mystery, and a third on quantum physics and consciousness. She joked about her plans for the end of the world and how she’d wing it—confident enough in her four-stripe white belt jiu-jitsu skills and limited experience with canning.

This quirky, ALIVE, witty creature… He wanted to tell her the truth!

But instead, he replied with another perfectly rhythmic, overly arched paragraph that, while admitting he’d been using AI, was also generated by AI. He hit send and whispered…

The chat disappeared. She blocked him.

She had not fallen in love with a robot, let alone him.

In her mind, the simplest story was that he was lonely and desperate to be loved. Maybe he wasn’t confident enough to write for himself. And, alternatively, he was just a player with too many chats to track.

Eighteen months passed.

Presenting at a technical conference, she walked to her spot on the panel stage. A man with a wide smile joined the panel beside her. She recognized it but couldn’t place him.

She checked the agenda. Yes, she was in the right place—Rose Ballroom, 2pm, “Transparency and Ethics in AI Usage.” Then it clicked.

“This is an ironic panel for you to be on,” she said.

“After our interaction, I made some career changes.”

He dug through his backpack. He found what he was looking for and met her gaze, holding up a small leather-bound journal.

“You are one of my favorite stories to reread,” he said.

“Let me guess. ‘Let’s write the next chapter together,’” she quipped, throwing one of his AI-generated lines back at him.

“Yes. Would you like to grab coffee with me after this?”

//The only part of this story that is true is the initial exchange with the Oscar Wilde quote and that he used AI to generate all of his messages. I took some creative liberties. I didn’t use AI to respond to him, but ChatGPT and I did gossip about him. ChatGPT gave him the nickname Squirrel Bard after a dumb but poetic anecdote he shared.

Comments (1):

Beaux: I can’t believe I stumbled on this from LinkedIn. You got some of the details in the middle wrong like the government conspiracy. I was just working on my master’s thesis. I would really like the coffee date part to come true. I’m sorry about before. July 11, 2025, 11:11PM

█