At a developer conference in Austin I watched someone pitch an AI that writes breakup texts for you

I went to SXSW last month and sat through a demo of a chatbot that drafts breakup messages. The guy on stage said it uses emotional analysis to find the right tone. He showed a sample that said something like 'I value our time together but I need to focus on myself right now.' The audience actually clapped. I sat there wondering who asked for this. We have AI summarizing emails and generating code but someone decided we needed help ending relationships politely. The whole room seemed fine with outsourcing a hard conversation to an algorithm. Has anyone else encountered startups that are clearly solving problems nobody actually has?

2 comments

2 Comments

luna_craig5825d ago

I was at that exact same demo. My phone died twenty minutes in. Missed half of it. But I've used a similar app for a different reason. Helped me draft a message to my landlord about breaking my lease. Took all the emotion out of it. Made it sound professional and clean. Got my deposit back too. So maybe there's a use case for painful texts. Just not romantic ones.

jennyh5526d ago

You got a small detail wrong there. The conference in the post was in Austin, but SXSW is actually in Austin too so I can see why people get that mixed up. Anyway, that AI breakup text thing is something else entirely. A person should have the decency to break up face to face or at least over the phone. Handing that job to a chatbot feels like we are losing something important about being human.

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