Pickup lines and fine wines

Abstract

Pickup programming Artificial intelligence does a lot for us. It can drive our cars , help us discover drugs , and devise multistep chemical syntheses . AI is also heavily used in online dating platforms to match potential partners. And now, it can help us break the ice with them too. Well, sort of. Researcher and author Janelle Shane likes to make light of AI by getting computers to say and do funny things. A few years ago, Shane first practiced getting computers to generate pickup lines using a neural network—a series of computer algorithms that attempt to mimic the way the human brain makes connections. However, that neural network was relatively small. “Although it was completely inept, its pickup lines were utterly charming,” she tells Newscripts. One of those lines, “You look like a thing and I love you,” became the title of her book on AI. Neural networks