Artificial intelligence is responsible for many incredible things, from helping doctors identify patterns for disease diagnosis to analyzing stock trends so traders can better predict the market.
Newer programs like ChatGPT, Bing AI and Bard are changing the way people find and create information.
When used for good, AI is an exciting field. When used for evil, the implications are scary.
And when used to measure your attractiveness and connect you to similarly rated peers, well, we're not sure what to think. But Hot Chat 3000 exists anyway. It's the latest project from MSCHF, an art collective that's given us a series of strange stunts over the years, including Jesus Shoes, which feature holy water in the soles, and Big Fruit Loop, a box that contains one giant piece of cereal.
Hot Chat 3000 looks like an early-90s computer game, complete with auto-play music and bad graphics. It facilitates one-on-one chats, where who you're eligible to talk to is based entirely on how attractive you are. And how attractive you are is determined by AI, which analyzes your photo—you can upload one from your library or take a picture via webcam—and ranks you on a scale from one to 10. If you fall within someone's numeric group (7 to 7.9, for example), you're eligible to chat. How things go from there is up to you.
To be clear, these guys aren't just shallow idiots reliving the Hot or Not days. They're trying to make a point about AI and beauty standards. Per MSCHF:
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...Sociopolitical context and history haunt the outputs of AI: it is a stereotype visualizer and an implicit bias amplifier. Beauty standards do exist and machine learning models trained on vast amounts of data inevitably learn them.
It's a rather bleak look at AI. But it's also a pretty fun way to kill some time.
So, call it a draw.
