Art collective MSCHF is known for creating a variety of weird and wild limited-time promotions, such as a visual novel that pays you taxes, or a cereal box containing a giant Fruit Loop. Now MSCHF is tackling the hot topic of artificial intelligence with Hot chat 3000a bot that measures your attractiveness and connects you with similarly rated peers.
This scientific research is not without precedent; the internet has long explored the empirical hotness of its users, through channels like Hot or Not, Livejournal, Reddit, and others. What makes Hot Chat 3000 intellectually appealing is that users are transparent to the bot.
“Attractivenesstest.com, for example, appears to disproportionately place images of blonde children at the top of the attractiveness scale. Yuck,” reads the press release related to Hot Chat 3000, also known as HC3K.
“HC3K is a very imperfect, transparent AI-driven platform. Treat it like a sandbox; figuring out how to get 10s back from the machine; learn how to manipulate it. We all need exercise; this is a life skill from now to eternity.”
Still, HC3K is a ruthless matchmaker. Users grouped in the same numerical hotness category can chat among themselves, but no one else. These matches are also random, suggesting that few if any people will find a soul mate within HC3K.
However, that’s clearly not the point – the bot and news of its launch frame our society’s intrigue with AI and its current uses. As the press release itself says: “HotChat 3000 is built from pre-existing stock components: it’s a snapshot of what a handy collection of publicly available models and datasets determine how hot people are.
“HC3K visualizes a system to which we are or will soon be subjected,” the developers warn.