If you ask ChatGPT what plans it has for February 14, it will tell you that as a language model AI, it does not have personal plans or experiences. When you ask it ‘do you know what love is?’ or ‘do you feel what love is?’, it answers again that it does not have personal experience. Ironically, even though it can’t ‘feel’ love like we humans do, it ‘knows’ what love is. 

We asked ChatGPT to write a poem in the style of the famous English poet John Keats. It did a good job but the poem was obviously not customised to how we would want it if we were to send it to someone. Built on GPT 3.5, the LLM can give words to the user’s imagination in a flawless way. But it inevitably fails to evoke emotions. 

According to cybersecurity company McAfee’s recent ‘Modern Love Research Report’, this Valentine’s Day, one out of four, that is, 26% of people plan to use AI to write notes, letters, or songs for their loved ones. Out of that, 30% were men who were found to be more inclined towards using AI for this purpose compared to women (22%), and with Indian men being the most likely to use it (62%).

Read more: ChatGPT: The Secret to World’s Love Affair with AI

Since the debut of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, several users have experimented with it to express their love through poems and letters, among others. If you give ChatGPT a creative prompt, it can generate poetic dozens of page-long poems in under 30 seconds. You can even edit the output to make it better, as often as you want. 

Nearly 78% of Indians could not differentiate between a love letter written by ChatGPT and one written by a human. Although AI has the potential to take over human-written poems and letters to a large extent, it can never replace them wholly.  

In concurrence, Aran Komatsuzaki, PhD (ML) at Georgia Institute of Technology, told AIM, “AI-generated text will replace human-written love letters to a large extent. I believe it will become popular that people, at least, write a draft based on the ChatGPT-like system and improve it either manually or interactively, as this is much easier to write than from scratch. The person who received the AI-generated text may think that the sender is not putting enough effort into outsourcing the task to AI, so it’s likely that people will try to make it natural (for instance, intentionally making an error to make it look human).”

ChatGPT is Not Your Cupid

These LLM Chatbots (ChatGPT, Bard, and others) are programmed to generate text based on certain inputs and rules. However, the quality of the love letters generated by a chatbot would depend on its training data and the algorithms used. It is highly likely that, more often than not, their answers are going to be monotonous and robotic. 

But love is a complex human emotion and no matter how well-written a chatbot generated letter is, it can’t truly capture the depth and sincerity of love expressed by humans. Chatbots lack the emotional intelligence and personal experiences that make love letters written by humans unique.

“The only thing AI can do is make the work easier for people. But AI does not know about the person I am writing the letter to, so it can only build a module based on available information. We cannot expect AI to express emotions like a human can. AI may be a helpful tool, but it will never replace the human touch,” said Dr S. Kumar, head of AI technology-strategy-research IIT Delhi, in a conversation with AIM. 

People turn to AI writing for various reasons. An estimated 27% of them believe that using AI will increase the chances of their writing being well received, while 21% confess that they don’t know what to write without AI’s assistance. Additionally, another 21% of people stated that they don’t have the time to come up with something on their own.

LoveGPT

The birth of dating apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge has given a new approach to ‘love’. These AI-based dating applications employ machine learning to find possible matches and predict shared interests by gaining knowledge from data. In order to find and pair potential partners who are suitable for each other, they identify behavioural patterns along with a user’s likes and dislikes. Recently, dating app OkCupid revealed that it is testing a new category of match questions generated by ChatGPT to find better matches.

Compared to merely 24% in 2017, it is predicted that by 2040, 70% of all couples would have first met online.

Talking about the chances of finding ‘the one’ on dating apps, senior data scientist Alka Pandey at Unilever told AIM,  “Advanced algorithms used in dating apps can definitely find true love because it can best identify common interests. Some of the leading matrimonial and dating sites are so successful today because of relevant matches recommended with the help of AI.”

ChatGPT has also been widely employed by dating apps users to build bios, write messages to their matches and so on. However, using AI to answer on dating apps can shed a person’s chances of finding a partner because it prevents one’s attitude and vibe from manifesting on dating apps, according to dating counsellor and founder of NYC Wingwoman, Cher Gopman.

In the run-up to Valentine’s Day, 39% of individuals said that they would be more inclined to spend time on dating apps or websites. The highest users could be found in India, where 78% of people indicated that they would spend more time swiping. 

For the Love of Her, Don’t Use ChatGPT

While the idea of AI systems being able to understand and even love us may have been predicted by Spike Jonaz’s film ‘Her’, it’s not quite the reality yet.

The profound emotion in a hand-written love letter goes beyond technology and stands the test of time to become a precious memory. 

ChatGPT may be a published author, but you are better.

So, this Valentine’s Day, stay away from the ChatGPT, find that pen and paper on your desk and write that unique letter to your loved one. However, if you are looking to impress your partner and not be true to yourself, then go ahead and use ChatGPT.