I’m watching the new Ashley Madison documentary on Netflix with my husband (who was not on the list). We hadn’t yet met when the infamous list of aspiring adulterers was released in 2015, but I remember feeling the weird guilt you feel when a police car is driving behind you, even though you’ve done nothing wrong. Did I sign up to an adultery website and forget about it?
No, I didn’t. And as the documentary uncovered, neither did other many other women. The “service” was full of fake female profiles with chatbots trained to bleat sexy talk with winking emojis because there weren’t enough women signing up. Men, take note: real women with busy lives don’t want to “talk sexy” unless they’ve just been watching Outlander.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal is a Netflix documentary series which revisits the 2015 data hack of the cheating site.Credit: MARK BLINCH
It was a sign of things to come. According to the founder of the dating app Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd, single people looking for lurve won’t have to bother with tedious dates any more. They’ll have an artificial intelligence “concierge” (chatbot)........