Picture swiping through profiles on a dating app hoping to find that special someone.
You get into a conversation and you really like them.
But there is something unsettling.
It feels robotic, unnatural.
Now what if you discovered that the person on the other side of the screen wasn't a person at all, but a chatbot?
Over the course of a year, 23 year old Alexander Zhatan in Mosc says he engaged in conversations with over 5,000 women on the dating app Tinder, all facilitated by the AI chatbot known as ChatGPT.
After months of chatting, he found himself falling for one particular match.
Here's how he described it in a post in Russian on I have proposed.
To a girl with whom ChatGPT had been communicating for me for a year.
To do this, the neural Network communicated with 5, 239 other girls whom we'd eliminated as unnecessary and left only one.
I'll share how I made such a system, what problems there were, and what happened with the other girls.
This is the first post in a long thread that went viral when Alexander posted it in January this year.
Complete with screenshots and screen recordings, his thread appeared to provide an in depth look at his methodology, offering insights into his unconventional quest for love.
But his story raised some questions.
Do his claims stack up?
I'm Olga Robinson with BBC trending, and this is the story of a man who says he proposed to his Tinder match with a little help from AI.
But this isn't just a story about love.
It's a story about the evolving role of technology in our lives.
When I first heard about Alexander's story, I had many questions and some comments on his thread expressed skepticism about his methodology.
After Russia launched its full scale invasion of Ukraine, Tinder, like many Western companies, had taken steps to leave Russia and eventually left in June 2023.