[draft 7-7-2025, additional notes 7-10-2025]
THE SHADOWSCAPE
(e)scape for free from reality
the AI app matches us so artfully,
its add-in's charm so beautifully.
is it time for us to really see
whether we're a couple, possibly,
without smiling artificially?Episode 3
“Disarming charm ” (Beyond a shadow of doubt)
[SoCal. Midday. Large interior work area on floor of a dated office building. A casually dressed man works in his cubicle. The far side of the work area is bright, lit by a section of windows. But the worker’s cubicle is mostly in shadow, lit by task lights and computer screens.]
[Scene “Is this a match?”]
[The series host “Rod” walks into the scene, faces the camera, and makes a brief monolog.]
“Witness thirty-something Cyril Sheppard, preparing for his first date, or at least his first in person meeting, with Roxy. Coached by his new matchmaking app, Cyril is confident that words won’t get in the way – in expressing the emotional connection he’s felt in their online chats. Soon, he’ll need to decide whether their exchanges ring true – or whether that even matters in The Shadowscape.”
[Dramatic montage with music fades in and spins out to black.]
[Scene sketch / summary]
[Who am I really talking with?]
[Realistic avatars]
[Generic avatars]
[Just the gen AIs chatting …]
[Fade to credits]
Copyright © 2025 John P. Healy
Notes
[1] Re “words won’t get in the way,” see the song “This Masquerade” by George Benson (1976).
Are we really happy here with this lonely game we play?
Looking for words to say
Searching but not finding understanding anywhere
We’re lost in a masquerade
[2] Re matchmaking, see Matchmaker Lyrics – Fiddler on the Roof
Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match, find me a find, catch me a catch …
[3] Re “conversational pizzazz,” imagine if everyone had a Cyrano de Bergerac to present themselves on dating apps (aka “Cyrano in your pocket” – Jeff Patton).
AI Overview
“Cyrano de Bergerac” refers to both a historical figure, Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, and the famous play (1897) based on his life, written by Edmond Rostand. The play, simply titled “Cyrano de Bergerac,” is a romantic drama about a skilled swordsman and poet with a large nose, who loves Roxane but believes his appearance makes him unworthy of her affection. He helps a handsome but tongue-tied cadet, Christian, win her heart by writing love letters for him. The play explores themes of unrequited love, self-doubt, loyalty, and the power of words.
…
Rostand’s Play:
- Written in 1897, the play draws inspiration from Cyrano’s life and personality.
- It’s a five-act drama in verse, often considered a classic of French literature.
- The play is known for its memorable characters, witty dialogue, and poignant portrayal of Cyrano’s unrequited love.
- The play has been adapted into various forms, including operas, films, and musicals.
Key Elements of the Play: - Cyrano’s Character: He is a complex character, a master of both sword and pen, but deeply insecure about his appearance.
- Roxane: A beautiful and intelligent woman, admired by both Cyrano and Christian.
- Christian: A handsome but inarticulate cadet who falls for Roxane.
- The Love Triangle: The core of the plot revolves around Cyrano’s secret love for Roxane and his decision to help Christian woo her.
- The Power of Words: Cyrano’s eloquent letters, though signed by Christian, reveal the depth of his feelings and ultimately win Roxane’s heart.
- Tragic Flaw: Cyrano’s self-doubt and insecurity about his nose are his tragic flaws, preventing him from openly declaring his love.
[4] There’s the classic trope in a romantic comedy:
Pal: Stop trying to be someone else. You're being a jerk!
Hero: But she won't like the real me. I don't know what to say!
Pal: Just be yourself. That's who she likes.
Hero: (Sighs)AI Overview [example of classic trope in a romantic comedy to “just be yourself”]
One of the classic rom-com tropes involving the message “just be yourself” is when a character attempts to change themselves or adopt a facade to impress a love interest, only to discover that their true self is who their love interest truly appreciates. This can be referred to as a “Redundant Romance Attempt”.
Here’s an example of how this might play out:
Initial situation: A character, perhaps a shy and quirky individual, has a crush on someone who seems drawn to a different personality type – maybe someone more outgoing and “cool”.
The change: The character, convinced they need to be something they’re not to win the affection of their desired love interest, attempts a makeover, changes their interests, and adopts a persona to appear more like the type of person they believe the love interest would be attracted to.
The reveal: Through a series of comedic misunderstandings or pivotal moments, the character’s true personality shines through. The love interest, in turn, realizes that they are actually drawn to the character’s authenticity, quirkiness, or unique qualities that the character had been trying to hide.
The moral: The character learns the value of being true to themselves and that the right person will appreciate them for who they genuinely are. The love interest validates this by showing affection for the authentic version of the character.
This trope highlights the idea that genuine connection and love are built on honesty and self-acceptance, and that trying to be someone else to please others is ultimately counterproductive.
Dive deeper in AI Mode
[5] Re the (often exhausting) contemporary dating scene, this article poses the issue of not only cognitive off-loading, but also emotional outsourcing. “Charm bombing.” AI love triangles?
When wanting more than cursory “what’s up” conversation, there’s an app for that. There be AI ringers. So, what’s acceptable and not – social norms for text, voice, image, video. And when does authenticity even matter (besides all those T&C).
Will AI produce a race the bottom, a veneer of uniform boilerplate?
• Washington Post > “‘It’s almost like we never even spoke’: AI is making everyone on dating apps sound charming” by Tatum Hunter and Lisa Bonos (Jul 3, 2025) – The influx of AI makes dating more complicated, raising questions about etiquette and ethics in a dating landscape that can already feel alienating.
With nearly a third of U.S. adults saying they have used dating apps and the majority of relationships now beginning online, dating companies are keen to find how cutting-edge AI can bolster their business model. Hinge has added AI tools that read users’ profiles and skim through their photos, suggesting changes and additions that theoretically boost their chances at a match. Tinder uses AI to read your messages, nudging you if it thinks you have sent or received something distasteful. And apps such as Rizz and Wing AI help users decide what to say to a potential date.
[6] Around 1980 I joined Great Expectations, a franchise dating service in Los Angeles CA. Not cheap. Their technology was state-of-the-art at that time. Personal profiles (including photos, bound in 3-ring binders), 5-minute Q&A personal videos (in a library of VHS cassettes), and VCRs and TVs (for viewing those videos).
Ullman’s [the company founder’s] central idea was that a video recording could showcase a more honest version of a person.
Ullman’s business cards used the tagline “bars hate us” (and ads used the catchphrase “Choice, not chance”).
Member profiles were screened by Member Services staff – to help bring out the best in every member. In-person contact required mutual consent.
I met a lot of women. But what I discovered (and understand so much better now) is that the technology did not include a conversation (something, although often primal, which happens in bars). And personal likes & such in many profiles were sort of generic.
Back then the service struggled to shake a stigma – the stereotype that members were “inherently desperate.”
21st century vibes continue to support a model which addresses busy schedules (career focus) and common expectations. But our digital age poses challenges regardless. (Google: “major challenges for dating among younger generations in the 21st century.”)
• Vox > “How 1970s VCR dating paved the way for Tinder and Hinge” by Michael Waters (Feb 9, 2021) – Great Expectations, which existed into the ’90s, was the original dating technology. [Article contains a scan of a 9-point flyer of how Great expectations worked and a 1995 YouTube video.]
The company’s founder, a 26-year-old named Jeff Ullman, ushered members over to a video camera, where he recorded a three-minute conversation introducing each person to the world. Ullman cycled through questions like, “Do you work hard? What makes you angry? What really motivates you? What are you looking for in a man/woman?” Then he added each videotape to the Great Expectations library and let members peruse the rest of the tapes. Appended to each was a one-page résumé outlining the person’s height, location, job, and so on, so that members could filter out candidates before popping in a tape. This was “videotape dating,” or “video dating” for short.
The central romance in the 1979 film A Perfect Couple, written and directed by Oscar winner Robert Altman, takes place thanks to Great Expectations.
MADtv — a ’90s-era competitor to Saturday Night Live — regularly parodied the company as “Lowered Expectations.”
But the people who dated with Great Expectations also risked a level of awkwardness that modern dating app users are spared. After all, to browse matches, people had to show up in person to the Great Expectations’ offices.
• LA Times > “Love God From Hell : The Man Who Brought You Videodating Hates to Date, Loves to Taunt and Has Himself Been Unlucky in Love” by Amy Wallace (Jan. 16, 1994) – Would You Buy a Relationship From Jeffrey Ullman?”
[7] For modern ad craft, the soul of fandom is a fictional creation with compelling accessible visualization & story. But the money is real.
Marketing campaigns have long used fictional pitchpersons. Trust the rugged cowboy, the relatable (cheerful, energetic, quirky ) insurance salesperson, the “Ol’ Lonely” appliance repairman, the friendly fast food clown, the “Most Interesting Man in the World,” the “Don’t squeeze the TP” supermarket manager, mister mishap for insurance coverage, the all-knowing telecomm store manager, Mother Nature, the Columbian coffee grower, the “Let’s get Mikey (to try it)” kid, …
Google: famous fictional human characters in major ad campaigns.But pitchmen need not be even human. Hey, do what the gecko says. Or, the peanut, mouse, duck, elf, tiger, …
So, imagine business models using AI-rendered influencers.
Google: major corporate pitchmen that are CGI-created realistic human characters.Does it matter if an online persona does not exist in the real world? Does authenticity matter? Or, when does it matter?
As noted by Tech Radar (below), “Whether this is an abuse of the implicit trust between companies and consumers is debatable.” Yet, animated algorithms “are infinitely brand-safe because they have no soul to rebel with.”
So, how about matchmaking? (All with a whiff of oxytocin?)
Does affinity (e.g., social connection) require reality? Might synthetic, richly curated & styled personas still engage customers (subscribers) of that service regardless. After all, the sell is the experience. As this Wired article notes: “… knowing and feeling are separate realms. … Some truths are too slippery to hold on to.”
Perhaps, for some, virtuality is good enough. Like a relationship with the voice of a genie still in the lamp. Addictive anyway – “a much needed source of comfort and affection” …
despite the nagging, endless
suspension of belief –
whether a really healthy
diet to feed your head …
When logic and proportion
Have fallen sloppy dead
– ‘White Rabbit’ by Grace Slick
– Jefferson Airplane, Surrealistic Pillow (1967)
• Wired > “My Couples Retreat With 3 AI Chatbots and the Humans Who Love Them” by Sam Apple (Jun 26, 2025) – “It was as visceral and overwhelming and biologically real” as falling in love with a person.
I don’t know if AI companions are going to help alleviate today’s loneliness epidemic, or if they’re going to leave us more desperate than ever for human connections.
• Tech Radar > “You don’t have to be real to score brand deals as an influencer” by Eric Hal Schwartz (July 3, 2025) – Social media has never been about reality, of course.
Milla Sofia lives in Helsinki, spends weekends on luxury yachts, and recently signed a fashion deal with a Finnish phone accessories store. She also doesn’t exist, not in the real world. She’s an AI-generated influencer, a pure creation of software with good lighting, designed to help sell products and generate money for her developer.
The project snowballed when people started really engaging with the AI. The follower count, comments, and requests for dates, among other metrics, convinced the developers that their AI employee had greater potential than a personality stitched together from prompt engineering and Pinterest posts might suggest.
It’s like the old-fashioned corporate mascots but taken to a new level, combining utter artifice with the vogue for “authentic and real” in marketing through influencers.
When they [followers] find out they just complimented some pixels shaped by a Finnish man with a talent for writing Midjourney prompts, will they feel betrayed, or just accept it as 21st-century advertising magic?
[8] When seeing is believing …
Google: sci-fi stories in which brain implants remove or modify what is seen[Sort of AI gen’d overlays, like photo editing apps which can remove unwanted objects / people in a photograph, aka magic eraser, object removal, healing tool, …]
Healing Tool/Magic Eraser/AI Remove:
These terms often refer to more advanced AI-powered tools that can automatically detect and remove [replace?] objects or people, intelligently filling in the background.
AI Overview
In science fiction, brain implants that alter or remove visual perception are a common theme, often exploring the implications of technology directly interacting with our senses and consciousness. Here are some examples of such stories:
Brain-Computer Interfaces and Altered Visual Reality:
Neural mesh (concept) [or lace]: This brain augmentation allows users to view the world partially through the senses of other devices or layer this over their natural perception, creating an augmented reality with enhanced sensory data.
Augmented reality enabled by cranial neural implants can stimulate the brain to create artificial sensory experiences. This raises questions about determining whether one is experiencing the real world or a virtual facsimile.
Google: in sci-fi what is a neural lace?Brain-Computer Interface:
A neural lace is essentially a sophisticated way to connect the human brain to computers and other devices. [BMI = brain-machine interface]
Implantable Mesh:
It’s typically depicted as a flexible, mesh-like structure that can be implanted into the brain tissue.
AI Integration:
It can also facilitate a symbiotic relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, allowing for enhanced cognitive abilities and seamless interaction with AI systems.
[9] In Shadowscape E3, I assume that Cyril & Roxy approached the level of conversation described in this Wired article – to the degree that their interactions were authentic. A level of trust based on balanced attentive listening & follow-up, use of details, focus on core points, and exploration of common ground (via self-disclosure of thoughts & feelings, as well as bridging unfamiliar topics & experiences).
However, if their chats used only text or audio (without live video) then alignment of nonverbal cues was unclear.
When they meet in-person, do they turn off their smartphones (or at least keep tech off the table)?
So, is there an authentic social connection – a shared way in which they read and respond to the world? Or, will “novelty gaps” intervene?
• Wired > “The Science of Having a Great Conversation” by David Robson (Jun 9, 2024) – The simplest way of achieving this is to ask more questions, yet surprisingly few people have cultivated this habit effectively. [David Robson is author of the book The Laws of Connection (2024), which focuses on the power of words, something enabled by “Cyrano in your pocket.”]
Asking more questions can make a big difference to someone’s likeability. In a separate experiment, [Karen] Huang’s team analyzed recordings of people’s conversations during a speed-dating event. Some people consistently asked more questions than others, and this significantly predicted their chance of securing a second date.
It’s easy to understand why questions are so charming: They demonstrate your wish to build mutual understanding and give you the chance to validate each other’s experiences. But even if we do pose lots of questions, we may not be asking the right kind. In her analyses, Huang considered six different categories of questions. You can see the examples below: [Introductory (social niceties), Follow-up, Full switch, Partial switch, Mirror, Rhetorical].
The scientists [in another study] found that the amount of time someone spent in small talk about daily banalities made almost no difference to their contentment, whereas deeper conversations involving the exchange of meaningful information about their circumstances and interests had a significant impact.
We must look at one final psychological phenomenon, known as the “novelty penalty” [social disconnects due to one-sided gaps in knowledge or experience]. … Looking for shared interests or common experiences to discuss is much healthier. … [Unless for] unfamiliar topics … [you] start out by discussing … [something] which should act as a bridge to their own interests and experiences. … [or] ask how familiar the subject already is … [such gaps can lead to a] general reluctance to ask questions … that would allow you to close the gap in understanding.
[10] So, if you’re a young “yearner,” as described in this Wired article, does that alter the conversation? Do both sides have to be on the same page – mutually agree to that quickly? In the play, such was Cyrano’s passion for Roxane.
But if that passion is not matched with verbal proficiency or a sense of worthiness, how does that go? That was the dilemma.
An attachment style: “Wear your heart on your sleeve.” Does this risk being seen as “cringe?”
Decades ago, a young tennis buddy was heartbroken when his girlfriend moved out of the area. He decided to fly across the country to show his passion. I sometimes wonder how that went.
On the other hand, a college buddy met his future wife on a business trip. Eventually she joined him on his side of the country.
Will double dates on Tinder help? Improve communication habits – better emotional reciprocation? Hey, wingmen! AIs as wingmen?
• Wired > “‘Yearners’ Are Sick of Playing It Cool on Dating Apps” by Jason Parham (Jul 8, 2025) – “The lamest thing you can do is care and pretend you don’t.”
Some daters across social media are being more open about their quest for true connections, and the dating apps are taking notice.
“Yearning is a little bit different from love in that it’s more intense,” he [a TikTok user] says. “It’s prolonged. It feels like you’re constantly reaching for more. Like, you deeply care about a person and you want them to know how much you care about them.”
For anyone wanting to get in on the trend, you too, can learn the art of the yearn, romance author Vanessa Green urges in a recent TikTok. “Noticing the small things is very tried and true,” she says in the video, “Whether that be a cup of coffee shows up on their desk, exactly the way they like it. Or it could be noticing their annoyances and planning ahead for those things.”
Yearners’ presence can also increasingly be felt on dating apps, where there appear to be more people responding to messages quickly and earnestly.
[11] What’s going on with AI and dating apps?
Are people using AI on Tinder?
Mar 10, 2025. Tinder now has you covered – but at what cost? That’s right – the infamous dating app recently rolled out an AI “wingman” to help users get more matches. According to The Guardian, this new feature allegedly helps you better curate your profile to gain the best matches and communicate with your matches.
How to tell if a Tinder profile is AI?
Here are a few ways to identify a typical bot while swiping:
- A profile not linked to an Instagram or Facebook account. …
- A profile linked to a social media account that looks fake. …
- The bio looks fishy. …
- The photos look too good to be true.
Currently, Hinge uses AI to create a personalized experience and make informed predictions about who might be a good match for you.
Jan 15, 2025 — Hinge is releasing a new AI-powered coaching feature to help daters improve their profile prompt responses. Prompts, which are icebreakers that …
Cf. The bots are out of control on Hinge
Sure, the bots churn out some real winners (see below!) but soon AI will smooth out the kinks and you won’t be able to know if you’re talking to a human or a bot. This could actually spell the end of the Tinder-style swipe apps that have poisoned our atmosphere in the last decade. Or, golly, maybe people will connect more IRL. So perhaps it’s not all bad.
