"No one wants to write these days. Kids send voice notes. Boomers blast out Bitmoji. A.I. is depressingly inescapable. So, when Philip Leif Bjerknes, a marketer and former Craigslist dater, designed a text-based, photo-free dating app, he knew that some prospective users might need help expressing themselves. Machine-generated slop would undermine his whole endeavor, which he'd decided to call Oh Hi."
"At Clem's, a classic corner dive in Williamsburg, Bjerknes would offer participants dating advice while they waited for their turn to sit at the bar with English, who would translate their conversation into solicitous slivers of text. English, whose thick gray-brown hair swooped over her head, was game. "I've always just kind of loved to take anybody's writing and punch it up, clean it up, make it simple," she said."
Philip Leif Bjerknes created Oh Hi, a text-only, photo-free dating app that foregrounds personal profiles and resists machine-generated blurbs. He and copywriter Katie English co-host a free personals workshop at a Williamsburg bar to help users craft better profile copy. English listens to short conversations and translates them into concise, solicitous profile lines. Participants describe preferences—like a casual, low-effort relationship, patience in wine shops, and playful toleration of messy hair—and receive edited, personable copy. The workshop emphasizes authenticity, attention, and human-crafted language as antidotes to impersonal messaging and generic AI output.
Read at The New Yorker
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