Meet The Chatbot That Makes It Easier To Ghost Bad Dates

Imagine never having to deal with aggressive texts or unwanted photos ever again. Ghostbot hopes to make online dating easier by handling bad dates so you don't have to.

As you may have guessed from the name, Ghostbot is a bot that ghosts on your behalf. 'Ghosting' – for those who aren't up on 21^st century dating lingo – is the act of ending a relationship by disappearing. Instead of initiating a formal breakup, someone who ghosts will simply stop responding to your messages. You'll never see or hear from them again (good luck getting closure).

Unsurprisingly, ghosting is considered bad form. It's rude, immature, and cowardly. But anyone who reads the dating horror stories that are passed around the Web can see that, sometimes, when a date is delusional or dangerous enough, ghosting can seem like the only viable option.

Enter Ghostbot. Ghostbot is designed to respond automatically to a date and, hopefully, let them down easily. While you're off looking for the next relationship or enjoying singlehood, the app conducts your breakup using a variety of programmed texts. Product designer Lauren Golembiewski explained Ghostbot to Macworld like this:

As we were thinking about this broken culture of dating and texting, we noticed that women disproportionately receive aggressive and inflammatory messages

Golembiewski said.

If they respond or don’t respond, even if they try to be diplomatic or let it go, the guys on the other side escalate that situation. We wanted an option somewhere in the middle of not responding and actually trying to address the situation and let them offload that into a bot so they don’t have to think about it. So we created Ghostbot, which responds to a wide variety of messages. We primarily focused on a lot of the aggressive situations and created responses to those incoming texts.

Ghostbot does your dirty work, but it doesn't get too dirty. Golembiewski says the bot is designed to “de-escalate and not engage.” It avoids inflammatory remarks and sticks to noncommittal responses, like “I just have no time right now” or “Sorry, I’m just completely overwhelmed with work." The bot recognizes specific categories of comments and choses from hundreds of prewritten responses accordingly. If the other person’s language becomes too aggressive, Ghostbot stops responding. If the conversation becomes threatening, the bot automatically blocks the person.

As an added bonus, Ghostbot is built on top of Burner, an app that lets you create temporary, anonymous phone numbers. Hand out your burner digits to a date and you never have to worry about being harassed on your real number if things go south.

Is Ghostbot the future of breakups? It's not a substitute for the personal touch, but under the right circumstances, it could be the tool that saves your sanity.