[muzani]

I do chatbots focused on interesting conversations. Not specifically to solve this; it's just that I find most conversations dull and I'm the kind of person who would marathon Sorkin/Tarantino just to listen to people talk.

Would you be interested in an open ended first date sim? It could be voice so you get used to voice; one issue I have is I can type well but the brain circuits don't trigger the same way when talking.

Possibly start with an interested date at lower difficulty - someone who asks you the questions and coaches you into interesting answers. Then ramps up to shy/unfriendly where you have to work to get them engaged.

[OccamsMirror]

This is definitely cyberpunk dystopian response.

Lonely? Why not talk to machines?

Grim.

[muzani]

Talking is a skill. Skills are improved with usage and practice. Not everyone wants to practice on another human. Honestly, it's a bit of a jerk move to date people to practice dating someone better.

When people say they're unattractive, often it's not because they're ugly. Ugly is a disadvantage, but not the biggest one.

For both men and women, it's usually because they lack confidence. Or they're boring. Or sleazy. If you're getting into a first date and not a second, you're likely attractive enough on the 'resume', just messing up on the actual date. You might be saying something wrong. You might be delivering a good joke the wrong way. Sometimes it's just saying things in the wrong order.

The longer they go without some form of success, the less confident they become.

I thought the diagnosis was fairly clear; sorry for jumping straight to pitching a cure. This is a good example of saying things in the wrong order.

[OccamsMirror]

> I thought the diagnosis was fairly clear; sorry for jumping straight to pitching a cure. This is a good example of saying things in the wrong order.

That you think LLMs are the cure to loneliness misses what a "cure" even looks like here. OP clearly writes well enough to get first dates - the issue isn't conversational content but likely body language, energy, presence, the thousand micro-signals that happen below conscious awareness. You can't chatbot your way into better posture or more relaxed eye contact.

This is classic LLM wrapper syndrome. Someone has a hammer (conversational AI) so every problem looks like a nail (conversation optimization). But the actual failure mode here probably happens in the first thirty seconds of meeting, before anyone's even said anything substantive.

Op would probably benefit more from something social like improv classes (physical presence, spontaneity), dance lessons (body awareness, comfort with proximity), or honestly just hanging out in social spaces doing things they actually enjoy rather than performing "date behaviors." The energy of someone genuinely engaged in something they love is magnetic in ways that no amount of conversation optimization can replicate.

I just don't believe that "practice talking to a computer" will ever be a sufficient platform to teach people how to be genuinely charming, let alone charmingly genuine.