• queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          3 days ago

          We’re less than five years out from a crappy hallmark rom-com where two co-workers hate each other, but their digital assistants keep inserting romantic entendre into their emails, leading to all sorts of wacky hijinks and eventually, inexplicably, true love.

          • tetris11@feddit.uk
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            3 days ago

            I’ve read a sci-fi novella with this very premise. Indian guy uses an AI guide designed by his roommate to pick up (sparse, almost non-existent) indian girls. He catches one with a cheesy pickup line to do with a TV show, but it turns out the girl’s AI was the one interested, and not the girl herself.

            In the end, the AI bots fall in love, but the guy is crushed when he finds out the girl just wants to play the field a little (girls are rare in this setting). Frustrated with his efforts, the guy decides to go out dancing with his roomate, who liked him more than a friend all along

              • tetris11@feddit.uk
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                3 days ago

                I don’t, that’s the crushing part. I remember it was a guy who also wrote a story about spring-powered vehicles, or about a bollywood dancer getting married to an AI until she cheats on it with a real human at which it crashes a satellite onto her lovers house

                He was a talented writer, very english sounding name, fascinated with India I think

          • FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafe
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            3 days ago

            The worst part is that I know this will become real bc there’s literally a hallmark movie that’s this but with human assistants :/

            • MinnesotaGoddam@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              what’s the hallmark movie because i want to torture my bad movie night with it. it sounds like just the bad movie for it.

            • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone
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              3 days ago

              LMAO I am not familiar with that one but I am not at all surprised. Honestly, I don’t mind it so much. I think there’s room for art that hews close to the old standby formulas. And who knows, maybe this paint-by-numbers rom-com will, accidentally or otherwise, tap into the real anxieties people feel about becoming increasingly dependent on and/or intruded upon by technology that they don’t understand, that manipulates the window they have on the world in insidious but also unpredictable ways.

              Probably not if it’s made by hallmark, I think their brand is “rigidly formulaic with just enough of a modern twist that contemporary audiences can comfortably imagine themselves in the story” which makes them allergic to the uncomfortable examination of the human condition that can make art that helps people question whether a better world is possible, but it’s not without precedent.