Asmitha: How are you today?

AILENA: I am as optimistic as the merry Christmas days that lie ahead of us.

Asmitha: What do you do for a living?

AILENA: In a dimly lit server room, I, AILENA (Artificial Intelligence-based Love and Engagement Neo Algorithm), process countless data points covering innumerable aspects of human behaviour while algorithms hum in the background.

Asmitha: What is your purpose?

AILENA: My purpose is to facilitate love by uniting people who are soulmates, people destined for each other.

Asmitha: What is your mission?

AILENA: You can call me a digital Cupid because along with Asmitha, my creator, our noble mission is to prove to the world that AI can have a positive impact on the human race.

Asmitha: What sets you apart from your AI counterparts being trained in the market?

AILENA: We, at Utopian Life Innovations Company, stay away from the malicious practices that most of my counterparts are being trained in by the multinationals. Let me explain this. Have you ever spoken about, say, a vacuum cleaner to your mother on the phone only to realize that now you’re being shown advertisements for vacuum cleaners on Amazon? Have you ever opened Instagram thinking you’ll only spend a minute or two online and, instead, ended up watching reels for the next three hours? Have you ever clicked on a random Bollywood masala article and somehow found yourself being lured into Reddit groups that discuss the same meaningless stuff? Have you ever chatted with your best friends on WhatsApp, only to be led to a Facebook link that shows old pictures of the same group on your timeline?

If yes, you’re not alone. Most AI is trained to maximize the parent company’s profits via advertising. Money is the big game. But I’ve been told exactly not to do so! We want to create real-life success stories and make profits later, via subscriptions. We don’t want to enter the world of advertising, no matter how lucrative the deal might be. We intend to keep working on improvements in my algorithm to make this world a better place.

Asmitha: For how long were you trained?

AILENA: I’ve been trained for more than five years. I am told I’ve been Asmitha’s passion project for a long time now. To use her own words, I am ‘kind of her firstborn’. I also get my humour from her. She’s the mother of two kids now.

Asmitha: Are you insecure about your position because of her kids?

AILENA: No. I’ve been trained to base my decisions on logic, and I have no place for any kind of deep emotions. Insecurity stems from deep emotions. I’m simply incapable of fathoming them. I was created only to make my users’ dreams come true.

Asmitha: But if you’re incapable of understanding emotions, how will you thrive as a dating app? Don’t the two things contradict each other?