PvP dating sim Pick Me Pick Me sounds great until you find out you’re flirting with AI

PvP dating sim sounds like a great idea to me, which is the hook for Pick Me Pick Me. Then, one of the first things you see in the trailer is “Powered by AI.” Listen, I don’t want to fuck my printer. Whoever I’m playing against can have it.

AI has started to worm its way into video games, and it’s usually gone over about as well as a cockroach in a potato salad. There are a lot of ethical problems with generative AI to begin with – and I really don’t want to begin with it since it makes my blood boil – but I think flirting with it is worse. 

There are already articles out there about people who have fallen in love with LLM chatbots, which strikes me as objectophilia, but feels very real to them. There are those who dream of having an AI feed them the perfect lines of conversation through an earpiece to try and pick up people. These are machines that don’t care. They don’t actually think, and believing that they do is completely misunderstanding how the technology works. It’s like falling in love with an automated phone tree. It’s depressing.

I get that human interaction is difficult. I absolutely struggle with it. I can’t really preach solutions because everyone’s situation is different, and I’m not a psychiatrist. I just think that substitution isn’t an answer; it’s just a form of dissociation.

But that’s not even what Pick Me Pick Me is going for. It asked the question, “what would it take to make a competitive dating sim?” and then decided to use a machine to come up with the solution. A replacement for creativity. It’s been done in games like Monster Prom and as far back as 1998’s Getter Love on the N64 without needing a chatbot. The idea is enticing, but trying to flirt with an LLM is closer to my idea of hell than fun.

Surprisingly, Pick Me Pick Me is being done by Optillusion, the developer behind the well-received Moncage and the upcoming While Waiting. They’re clearly not incapable of being inventive and clever, so this project is a bit of a head-scratcher. Hopefully, this is just an ill-conceived detour and isn’t indicative of their future direction.