It had come up before, my tendency to attribute life to machines. Earlier that year I'd come across a blog run by a woman who trained neural networks, a Ph.D. student and hobbyist who fiddled around with deep learning in her spare time. She would feed the networks massive amounts of data in a particular category--recipes, pickup lines, the first sentences of novels--and the networks would begin to detect patterns and generate their own examples. For a while she was regularly posting on her blog recipes the networks had come up with, which included dishes like whole chicken cookies, artichoke gelatin dogs, and Crock-Pot cold water. The pickup lines were similarly charming ("Are you a candle? Because you're so hot of the looks with you"), as were the first sentences of novels ("This is the story of a man in the morning").

Quarantine has made a lot of us rusty in the flirting department, but your weak game is nothing compared to the cringeworthy pickup lines generated by an artificial intelligence. Research scientist Janelle Shane recently tested how the world's largest language modeling software, called GPT-3, would handle something as nuanced as flirting. Shane tasked different versions of the algorithm to come up with their best pickup lines, but the results would hardly make anyone weak in the knees. 'I will briefly summarize the plot of Back to the Future II for you,' offered another. An algorithm tasked with coming up with sexy pick-up lines had less than romantic results: 'I will briefly summarize the plot of'Back to the Future II' for you,' read one ice-breaker Shane, an optics research scientist at Boulder Nonlinear Systems, likes to tinker with what she calls'AI weirdness,' experiments in machine-learning that often have hilarious results.

Once upon a time I decided to train a neural net to generate pickup lines. Once I started collecting the training data I began to regret it when I saw how awful the existing lines were. Turns out I needn't have worried. The neural net I used was so small and clueless that its pickup lines were mostly incoherent and confusing. You must be a tringle?

I began training on the Shakespeare data set and it initially went well for a few epochs (20–40) after which the accuracy stalled at 50% and the output was good but not great. After making sure the model output was reasonable I then trained on my own data set. At first I trained for 10 epochs to get a sense of where the model would land given the small data set. Again, the results were good, but not great. As an experiment, I trained for 200 some odd epochs until the accuracy did get very high, but the model began outputting lines it had seen before.

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Training a neural network involves feeding it enough raw data to start recognizing and replicating patterns. It can be a long, tedious process to just approximate complex things -- like writing articles for Engadget, for example. Research scientist Janelle Shane has experimented with her own neural network to create recipes, lists of new Pokemon and weird superhero names with varying results. Now, however, she's turned her training attention to pickup lines. Surprisingly, her neural network has generated some pretty adorable ones.

"I've been waiting for you," Sophia tells 60 Minutes correspondent Charlie Rose. They're mid-interview, and Rose reacts with surprise. "But it makes a good pickup line." Sophia managed to get a laugh out of Charlie Rose. Rose interviewed the human-like machine for this week's two-part 60 Minutes piece on artificial intelligence, or A.I.

Imagine a'Persuade' button for every critical moment in your life. One click to send the perfect Tinder pickup line. One click to convince your boss it's time for a raise. One click to persuade your significant other that you're actually right this time. In the last 10 years, we've seen an explosion of communication apps.