Carlos Mayers on building a dating app where the only person you can date is him.

Look at us, we're in love (with Los).

It’s 11.30pm on a Tuesday night. You open up your dating app of choice. Hinge, Tinder, Bumble, whatever - they’re all pretty much the same. Swipe, swipe, swipe, like, like, like. More often than not, you aren’t getting attention from the people you like and the people you are being matched with, you don’t like. “Maybe I’m not hot enough” you wonder. “Or maybe they’re gate keeping all the hot people from me?”. 30 minutes later you let out an exasperated sigh and turn off the light as the irony washes over you: the longest relationship you’ve had out of all, is with Tinder itself.

Faced with modern dating dystopia, Carlos 'Los' Mayers is a Brooklyn based coder decided to take matters into his own hands. His new app slash art project 'Flirt with Los' is the ultimate paradox—a dating platform where the only available match is Los himself.

The concept is simple. Booting up ‘Flirt with Los’, users are presented with a Tinder-like UI where they can either like or reject Mayers. If they ‘like’ Mayers, then they are provided with several AI ‘flirts’ to send. If they reject Mayers, an image of him crying appears with the message ‘try again’. It’s singular ‘Los’ based attraction.

This week on World of Eso, Los joins us to wax modern dating, AI companions, and most importantly of all, whether he’s found love.

I have to ask. It’s the question on everyone’s minds, did it work? Have you found love?

*laughs I have not found love yet. I was the face of the app initially but after a week, my next move was to make someone else the face. Right now it’s ‘Flirt with Emma’.

I get a lot of questions on how the dates went and how successful the dates were but really it wasn’t about that. It’d be the most selfish thing to keep myself as the face. Truly, it’s not a dating app at all. What’s refreshing about the app is that it takes the pressure away. People are coming to it as entertainment. It’s a Vegas slot machine chance at lust. You know, it’s work wife coded - flirting, not dating.

When did you realise you wanted to build ‘Flirt with Los’

I was frustrated with dating and I liked the idea of creating a funny experiment around it with my friends as an inside joke.

Last year, I was shooting a lot of shots in person. I’d see someone that I’d think was attractive and try to go strike up a conversation with them. I was being bold, I was being confident, but I realised that a lot of the shots I was taking weren’t high percentage shots. They were sort of like full court NBA shots.

In another time in the 80s or 90s, that was how people met but I think there’s a level of Tinder or Hinge brain now where unlimited access to people through apps has changed how we think of dating.

Like, some people have several thousand matches, how do you even sort through that? Flirt with Los was a way to turn that on its head.

The ‘flirts’ in ‘Flirt with Los’ are AI generated. There a lot of AI dating products coming out right now that help people date. With it already being so easy to fake a persona online, what do you think the effect of these AI assistants will be?

Maybe our AI agents will eventually chat to each other, set up a date and then we meet up in person and see how it goes?

Kind of like that Black Mirror episode where AIs date each other to test compatibility of the people they’re based on…

I mean, something like that? I don’t think it’s a good path we’re heading down though. Online dating exacerbates the dynamics of dating where you have the people at the top of the totem pole are so successful and the people at the bottom are more despondent ever, then you have these AI companions like Replika —I mean, this generation, you’re going to go anywhere you can have this micro-dosed version of “I’m going to be the guy”, “I’m going to be the king”, like “who cares if I’m at school or work for hours as long as I can come home to my AI”

How do you see ‘Flirt with Los’ expanding?

You’re going to see the app becoming very Bachelor/Bachelorette-like competitive dating. We’ll have apps for different regions and different people will be the faces of each region. Maybe the face will rotate every 15 minutes and people can race to be the face.

We have to attack [dating] with something as light and funny as flirting. I think we’ve missed this part of dating. Online dating has been about mass appeal when reality dating is not mass appeal at all.

We have to attack [dating] with something light and funny as flirting. I think we’ve missed this part of dating where online dating has been about mass appeal and dating is not mass appeal at all.

In a way, it makes a lot of sense to have an app based around singular attraction. It’s something so perfectly human when there’s nothing presented [in a dating profile] about someone’s school or degree, 18 photos of them or what they get at Trader Joes. Here you don’t even see the person’s name on the screen. It’s almost like you’re seeing someone at a bar across from you and you have two options either to flirt or pass.

I think we’re going to see the most flirts in American history this year on this app *laughs*.

Lastly, do you consider yourself a romantic?

Yeah, I definitely consider myself a romantic. One of the greatest lessons I learned from my first relationship was how to express romanticism in a way that the other person can truly feel loved by it, and also understanding in which ways I don’t have the best ways of showing love. The second I feel like something’s good, I’m like my whole brain chemistry changes.

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Los’s Taste

What are you reading? Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple's Success

What are you listening to? Whitney Houston

Where are you hanging out? I love hanging out at home and inviting friends over to watch something or to play some games. That is my ideal scenario.

What’s on the wishlist? Love some stuff I got from Good Fight recently.

Follow Los

X: https://twitter.com/downloadlos