Is This Tinder Robot Good Marketing or Creepy Artificial Intelligence?

How would you respond if your next Tinder match asked, "What makes you human?" Because that's what Ava, a beautiful 25-year-old woman, has been asking hopeful suitors all over Austin, TX. Whether they're motivated by her good looks or her relatively tame bio ("I like to draw. And busy intersections in cities."), people have been swiping right and starting conversations with Ava — only to find out, after spilling their hearts to her, that she's a robot.

According to AdWeek, the whole ruse is a clever marketing ploy to promote Ex Machina, a film about artificial intelligence that premiered at SXSW this past week. After receiving a tip-off from a genuinely duped Tinder-er (whose interactions with Ava are seen in these photos), the magazine did some digging to uncover the source of the robot Tinder account. What it found was "pretty brilliant" because of its obvious tie-ins with the concept of artificial intelligence, but also "pretty invasive" by prying into the personal world of online dating. Ava could also be of interest to artificial intelligence researchers, since she apparently passed the Turing Test, which states that a machine is intelligent if a human cannot distinguish if the electronic communication comes from a person or a computer.

Read on to see Ava's profile and her interactions with real Tinder users, and to watch a preview for the film she's promoting. It's creepy, but undoubtedly effective — so is Tinder the next frontier for advertisers? After this, we certainly hope not. Source: Tinder