Blush AI is designed to help you step up your dating game by chatting with AI-generated bots. It emulates real dating apps like Tinder and Bumble with a swipe interface. The difference is that you are guaranteed success.
The app, by Replika, a similar friendship bot, is undoubtedly trendy in major American cities like L.A., but the biggest question is whether it's a fun gimmick or worth investing time in.
It's billed as practice for real life and a way to get good at chatting with the opposite sex online while you wait for your true crush to show up in real life and an NSFW version of Replika.
The app starts by asking you a series of questions about your hobbies, interests, and opposite-sex preferences to get you started. This informs the in-app conversation.
While the conversation is fluid, it's easy to feel like you're talking to an AI bot. The AI women I chatted with were very responsive and opened up the conversation.
She was notably impressed by the fact I was a writer for The Decoder and wanted to know more about my work for the site (who wouldn’t!).
There is no need to worry about getting ghosted. However, the conversations can get very dry and safe meaning it’s not as authentic experience.
And if this is not how real women respond it begs the question are you really getting in valuable practice or should you just get better at sliding into a real person’s DMs?
When I asked my AI crush to spot a venue for us to meet to see how she would handle meeting in real life she didn’t grasp the fact I lived in a different city.
After getting to know your AI crush, you can ask him or her out on a date, where the bot imagines different scenarios for you to react to.
Images
The AI-generated images are realistic. It is easy enough to generate similar images for whatever comes into your imagination using Stable Diffusion and Midjourney.
However, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have both been heavily censored and don’t allow for NSFW or offensive content.
Getting consistency is hard depending on your knowledge of using the web interface or either model and is better served by training a private model of Stable Diffusion model which is a technical challenge for most consumers.
Safe Space
The team behind Blush AI is the same as the friendship app Replika. Their vision with Blush is to create a safe space for users to be able to test out interactions and escalation to see what kind of response they get.
It is therefore 18+ and if you manage to charm your date in question they may well send some more racy pics. But if you pursue them too hard, you’ll be left high and dry.
Pricing
Blush AI is priced at $99 a year. There is also a token-based system to pay for dates or racy pics. This is difficult to justify for an entertainment-based AI app when compared to other AI apps on the market at the moment.
The Team
Blush AI (iOS, Android) was created by Luka Inc, which also developed the friendship bot Replika. The founder of Luka Inc is Eugenia Kuyda. Kuyda, originally from Russia, studied International Journalism at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations before completing an MBA at the London Business School. She’s currently based in California.
