Episode 36: "Can AI Teach Me How To Flirt?"

In this episode of The Curvy Girl Dating Podcast, Cristina Gonzalez, the Curvy Girl Dating Coach, delves into the intriguing topic of AI flirting apps. She shares her initial experiences with these digital companions and discusses their potential to reduce dating anxiety while highlighting their limitations in fostering genuine human connection. Cristina emphasizes the importance of real-world practice, emotional courage, and maintaining authenticity in dating. She also introduces her 'Five Cs of Real Flirting' methodology and teases an upcoming webinar on integrating AI tools to enhance dating experiences. Tune in to hear Cristina's insights and join the conversation on how AI might change the landscape of dating.

00:00 Introduction and Personal Story
00:41 Welcome to The Curvy Girl Dating Podcast
00:53 Exploring AI Flirting Apps
02:55 Personal Experience with AI Flirting
06:21 The Limitations of AI in Dating
10:16 Balancing AI and Real-World Dating
12:16 Upcoming Webinar and Final Thoughts

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Transcript

Cristina: 0:09

​Hi, I'm Cristina. After 10 years of dating, I was tired of attracting the wrong type of guys and thinking I had to lose weight to find love. I finally figured out how to date and I found the love I thought I would never find each week. I'll teach you dating advice, share dating stories and help you ditch the dating drama. My goal is to help you have fun and create the life you love. If you're ready to take your dating to another level, then listen up and let's go. Hello everyone. Welcome back to another episode of The Curvy Girl Dating Podcast. I'm Cristina Gonzalez and I am The Curvy Girl Dating Coach. Today we're gonna dive into a really good one. The topic today is can AI teach you how to flirt? I don't know if you've seen these new apps or anything, but they're basically like AI flirting bots, and I am curious to know if they're helpful, if they're harmful, or are they just weird and creepy? I've been seeing this trend a lot on social media ads, and they're promising you, to train your flirting game and help you practice with no pressure, no rejection, and no awkward silences. That's the promise they're claiming. So let's get started. Let's get into it. I'm curious, to see where this is gonna end up going and if it's gonna improve, keep evolving or if it's gonna die quickly.'cause AI is new for all of us and there's some great things to learn, it's helping us improve our lives, our professional careers and stuff like that. But as we're getting to know it, is it great? Is it bad? Is it harmful? All the things. Same thing with these AI flirting apps. I'm curious what that's gonna be like, because I just don't think at this point AI is gonna go away anytime soon. And I don't want it to, I personally enjoy using AI tools, but I think there's a responsible way of using it. So let's just get started on this AI flirting craze. So there's some apps, that are marketing themselves as digital companions. And they're like AI people that you can flirt with. You can practice texting, you can go on virtual dates with them. Some claim that they help build confidence, and others claim that they're just like a fun, flirty entertainment space. So it just depends on how these AI flirting apps are marketing themselves. Are they a tool to help you build confidence or are they fun and flirty entertainment only kind of things? I went ahead and downloaded one myself just to see what the experience was like. I just couldn't help myself and I wanted to see what it was like. I didn't do anything too crazy. I pretended like I was talking to someone and that person said to me,"Hey, what do you wanna do tonight?" And I asked it to generate an answer for me, and it said,"how about we team up for a Netflix binge and some popcorn? I make the snacks and you bring the charm." That does not sound like me at all. I don't really know how it works in that detail yet, but I know that you can upload a conversation that you're having with someone. So if you're having a conversation with somebody in Bumble, you can upload the conversation and it can help you create these responses. Again, I don't really know the details but I do know that it's asking a lot of questions, in between. So it says,"Hey, this is the response I created for you," and then it asks, do you want to use this response or do you want a response that's funny or witty or flirty or formal or romantic? Do you want a short answer, a long answer?" And so you can choose which one you want and it'll regenerate the same reply. So when it did, basically I did it three times and it came up with the exact same sentence. There's not very much variation. It's very robotic, in my opinion. How about a Netflix binge? I'll bring the snacks and you bring that charm of yours." The second one was,"how about we dive into a Netflix and binge and I can handle the snacks while you bring the charm? And the third one was,"how about we team up for a Netflix binge and some popcorn? I can make the snacks and you can bring the charm." So even though I asked it for three different styles of responses, it basically gave me the same shit. It didn't impress me so far, but I'm sure if you put more, intricate conversations in there, it could get you more intricate responses. So again, of course it's how you play with it. And I even asked it to create pickup lines. None of them were for me. I can't even read them because they're a little bit too"R-rated" for me. Not that I'm a prude or anything. They're so lame that they're not even worthy of a conversation. How about that? Okay. So I downloaded one myself just to see what the experience was like. That was my experience. Okay. So I get it. I get the appeal. It's a cool idea in theory, but from what I was looking at very quickly, I feel like there's gonna be a lot lacking, but we can get into it later. It was just a quick little experiment that I tried, so I still don't necessarily have a lot of experience with it, but just from viewing it for a few minutes. I appreciate the idea and I think it's cool in theory, but I am not quite sure I could see it, as a real tool. So, it's appealing because you can type whatever you want. The AI never judges you. They always have a response and they always find you fascinating. They think that you're this great person. So of course they're pretending to be interested. It's a bot, that's what it was built for, right? So it's like you're on a date with someone that's never gonna ghost you. And it sounds like a great idea, but it gets a little sticky, right? It's not perfect right now at all. So for a lot of women that I work with, dating already feels hard. There's this fear of rejection, the insecurity, the awkwardness, you name it. So flirting with a bot can feel like a safe alternative, but a chance to test the waters before putting yourself out there. But I do wanna challenge it just a little bit because here's the thing, AI might make you feel less nervous. But it can also keep you less connected. These bots are designed to give you perfect responses. They flirt back exactly how you want them to. They will never say anything unexpected, but real dating and real flirting, it's messy, it's vulnerable. And honestly, that's what makes it real. If you're using a tool. That can't hurt your feelings, you're never actually going to practice emotional courage. You are never going to feel courage without feeling vulnerability. You're never going to feel happy without feeling sadness. You are never gonna practice emotional courage and warm your brain up to having conversations with people when you're just using a bot. You know it's gonna respond to you. The part of dating that's the frustrating part is all of that emotion, so you can write back this bot. And then they can write you back a response that you wanna hear. But if you use that same conversation and you put it to a real human, that person might not respond immediately. They might be working, they might have a life they have, might have things to do. They might be totally into you, maybe they're not, and this is where it gets crazy, right? Because you're not gonna get that response immediately and you don't really know what they're gonna say. And if they say something offputting on the app. Your brain is instantly gonna say,"oh, it's just a bot so I can just manipulate what I want to hear or what I wanna teach it." And you can't really do that with a human. So if you get something that you don't wanna hear in response, you can't just manipulate it into getting something that you want to hear. But that's not a real world way to look at things basically. In real world connection and having that, emotional chase or whatever, that you have those feelings that you actually have when you're dating. They're non-existent in the app. So it can also lead to reinforce this deeper belief that maybe you're not good enough for the real thing and like a real relationship, but you're only good enough for only the app fantasy game. Like this is really unhealthy because, think about it. I'm just saying, it could be a slippery slope. Having an emotional relationship that you're creating with a bot, like people can get really into it. You know what I mean? And I think you have to be strong enough of a person to know that this is a tool versus this is really gonna act like a real world situation. Because if you really use it like it's a real world situation. It's gonna create those feelings and it's not human, if that makes any sense. So when you go to the real human, how is it gonna work when it's not doing exactly what you want it to, and you're getting all these, responses that you're not expecting. Of course, you have this tool, but it's not you. So whenever you meet that person in real life, you're not gonna match and vibe with them because you're not creating a true, authentic connection. You are good enough and worthy enough for a real human connection and the right relationship you're looking for. So just know again that there's a separation between AI and reality. So, how can AI help? Like where can it help you? I'm not here to bash on AI because I love learning about AI. I love learning about how I can use it in my personal and professional life, but let's not forget, I am a coach and I'm not a tech snob. As much as I do enjoy learning about new technologies and learning how to use new things to make my life easier. I still know that there's a difference. It can help you by learning how to initiate conversation. So I think it could be a good initiation starter, but not, anything beyond surface level conversations. I think it's a great way to practice flirting without fear. It's just a way to practice knowing that you can have a playful banter and it's not gonna be as scary. The more muscle memory that you have, the more time you practice conversing with this bot, it's just practice knowing that you can have conversations. But the key is guidance and not dependence. You should never be relying on AI to tell you what to say, but using it to help you learn how to start conversations is the way to go. Ultimately, you should be learning to trust your own voice, your own rhythm, your own timing, and your own vibe. And that's what I teach. Right now I'm actually exploring ways to use AI with my clients. Not instead of coaching, obviously, but alongside it. So I'm not mad at it. I'm not mad at these AI flirting tools. I think they're pretty interesting so far. But if they help reduce anxiety and it helps you build some baseline comfort, then I don't see what's wrong with that. It's a way to just help you practice a little bit. Just getting rid of that anxiety and knowing that it's okay that you have a conversation. Again, keeping in mind, reality and AI. I'm working on this webinar, and it's gonna be about real dating and AI dating apps and how to incorporate it to make you a better dater. We'll talk about details as it comes along. Right now I'm just in the outline version of creating this webinar, so stay tuned for that. But right now I'm coming up with this five Cs of real flirting method. and again, in the webinar we'll go through it more, but, the five Cs of real flirting would be. Confidence over scripts. That's one. You don't need to have the perfect line. You just need to know that you're enough. Have the confidence to know that these are scripts, they're words. And you have to have the confidence to utilize the words in a real human fashion, and create that real human connection. So confidence over scripts. You don't need the perfect line, just be yourself. Communication with soul. When you're getting to know someone, you flirt a little bit, right? Flirting with someone doesn't have to be sexy or weird. Flirting is an honest, playful conversation. And AI can't substitute the authentic connection that you want to create. C number three is curvy centric worthiness. Curvy centric worthiness is when you are not working to overcome being plus size, right? Like you're not trying to make up for your body, you're not trying to be extra sweet to make up for your body size, things like that, right? You don't have to flirt from a place of neediness. You don't have to prove that you're good enough to anybody. Curvy centric worthiness is the belief that your body, your presence, and your personality are the full package. So that's what that is. Number four would be consent and calibration. You learn to read energy and respond to people in a way that feels aligned. So when you're in these apps, you have that limitation. There is no, energy that you're reading in these comments that you're getting through the AI app. You can't judge emotions from a bot. Real flirting helps you read people in a real way, versus if you're just using a bot and texting. It's always hard to text and understand, people's energy and vibes in text, conversations with real humans. So with a bot, I can imagine it'd be even worse. Connection over creation. You want to know that AI conversations lack truth and authenticity. You don't wanna sit and curate these perfect conversations that you're having with somebody and take all this time to make this perfect conversation flow on an AI bot. You wanna have a real conversation with somebody and have a real connection. You just need to show up how you are and not try to be this perfect person. Don't create all these filters for yourself that you do when you're practicing on an app or when you're practicing a text message too, and you rewrite the same thing over and over again. Show up how you are and create the connection that you want. Don't overthink it. Real flirting helps you build relationships, not just conversations. Whereas all of these, AI apps are just creating conversations. Authenticity and connection are not there. You can't replicate it. I think using these AI tools can help you reduce fear, but only if you pair it with self-trust, emotional safety, and real world practice. So a combination of both I think is okay. So can an app teach you how to flirt? Maybe, but only if you already know how to love your voice, your energy, and walk into a room like you are the damn prize, because you are. You still have to be able to create that for yourself. I'll share more about details of the live webinar soon, and I'll walk you through all of that in more depth whenever I do that. We will learn how to flirt smarter, use AI with intention, and learn how to build real magnetic energy and real conversations with people versus a computerized bot. So how do you meet in the middle? We're gonna learn all of that kind of thing in the webinar. It's gonna be awesome. I'm super excited. I just wanna do a little bit more research while I am creating this webinar. I'll make sure that I let you know as soon as I get it done. If you are interested, sign up for my email list because you'll get all the details there first. I always send people in my email list links to register for any events or webinars before I post it on social media. That is a good way to always be filled in if you are interested in getting any of my offers. So that's it for now. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I'm so interested in. Hearing about your experiences, if you've experienced using these apps, if it's been successful for you, if it's totally ruined a good conversation that you've had with somebody, tell me about all the great stories and the bad stories. I wanna hear'em all. So feel free to send me a message and tell me about your experience with AI flirting apps. thank you so much for listening and we will chat next time. Bye.