Art collective MSCHF is known for creating a variety of weird and wild limited-time promotions, like a visual novel that does your taxes, or a cereal box containing one giant Fruit Loop. Now MSCHF is taking on the hot topic of artificial intelligence with Hot Chat 3000, a bot that will measure your attractiveness and connect you to similarly rated peers.
This scientific examination is not unprecedented; the internet has long explored the empirical hotness of its users, through channels such as Hot or Not, Livejournal, Reddit, and others. What’s makes Hot Chat 3000 intellectually compelling is that users are transparently pitted against the bot.
“Attractivenesstest.com, for example, appears to rank images of blonde children disproportionately at the top of its attractiveness scale. Yikes,” reads the press release associated with Hot Chat 3000, also known as HC3K.
“HC3K is a highly imperfect, transparently AI-governed platform. Treat it like a sandbox; figure out how to get 10s back from the machine; learn how to manipulate it. We all need the practice; this is a life skill from now until eternity.”
Yet HC3K is an unforgiving matchmaker. Users corralled into the same numeric hotness category can chat amongst themselves — but no one else. These matches are also random, which suggests that few, if any, people will find a soulmate within HC3K.
That’s clearly not the point, however — the bot and the news of its launch are a frame around our society’s intrigue with AI and current use of it. As the press release itself says, “HotChat 3000 is built from pre-existing stock parts: It is a snapshot of what a convenient assemblage of publicly available models and datasets determine human hotness to be.
“HC3K visualizes a system we are or will soon be subjected to,” the developers warn.