This lesbian couple has found a way to “hack” their relationship, and it might surprise you. They use AI to resolve all of their arguments. Kara Wilson and Jen Titan are two lesbians who work in tech who are working on a new app to help sapphic couples better communicate. Called LezTalk, the app uses everything from past arguments to astrological placements to attaching styles to transcripts of therapy sessions to help queer women in relationships better talk to each other.
Kara and Jen experimented on their own relationship to develop the app. “We just realized that arguments were taking too much time,” Kara explained in an exclusive interview. “So we thought to ourselves: what if we could make these go faster?”
Kara and Jen struggled at first to train the AI bot for the project, because the slop it was already pulling from often led to homophobic answers. Once, the AI even referred to Jen by a slur. In an attempt to course-correct, the couple showed every single episode of The L Word to the AI bot, but this had some drawbacks, too. Whenever Kara and Jen asked LezTalk how to resolve arguments they were having, the bot would reply with follow-up questions like: “What would Shane do?” and “Have you considered starting a lesbian pickup basketball team randomly for one day about this even though neither of you play basketball?”
Kara and Jen admit the tech isn’t perfect and in fact the tool that was designed to help resolve their arguments was leading to more arguments between them.
They wanted to make couple fights go faster, and along the way, they developed the perfect tool to also make them go worse. But Kara and Jen aren’t giving up. They’re holding out hope that after a few more years of testing, LezTalk could completely change the relationship game.
