Dating, dating, dating. Where do we even begin? Once upon a time, people had no other option than to find love organically. It wasn't until 1965 that two Harvard students created the first computer-generated matchmaking service. Singletons were asked to fill out questionnaires based on their preferences and would receive a list of potential matches in return. Then came along Match.com in 1995 – the world's first dating website – which later evolved into the online phenomenon we know today with apps and social media accounting for 80 per cent of the modern dating scene. But now, opportunists are looking elsewhere – and it may surprise you. People are seemingly ditching the apps and turning to LinkedIn. Sign up for our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Now, LinkedIn is not and should not be used to seek out romantic relationships. It is a professional networking site and should be preserved for exactly that. If the intention is to purely find love, it not only comes across as creepy but also incredibly awkward – as one woman experienced herself. One TikTok user found herself in a LinkedIn love bomb when she was approached by an unidentified MBA student shooting his shot. She shared a screenshot of the interaction, which read: "Hey Hannah–skipping the line on a dating app and coming straight to you." "Aggressive move, [I know, I know.] Life’s too short not to go for what I am highly interested in," he continued, before softening the blow with an ever so slightly shift to a professional tone: "Happy to connect regardless of your openness to meet. Kindest regards." His attempt was met with fury online, with one calling it a "red flag," adding: "My rage would never. I would say LinkedIn is not a dating site it is a place to find a job." That said, making connections with people who share similar interests could naturally blossom into something more – and it's surprisingly working well for people across the world. TikToker Amber said people should be putting themselves in "environments with high-quality people," and believes LinkedIn is exactly that. "If you're on LinkedIn, I would say you're pretty ambitious and pretty driven," she said. "If you're going to dedicate and commit and be passionate about your career, then why don't you do that for a girl?" Explaining how it took her two years to find a romantic partner, she acknowledged it may be difficult to shift the conversation to dating. However, she believes "if you stick it through, it's going to be well worth it." @appleberryolivia Replying to @princesskynnnn be matched with your dream career and dream man ?? elite. #lovestory Meanwhile, for Noah at New Wave Media, his LinkedIn love story started by innocently looking for a job on the platform. He connected with a woman whose "profile was full of detail about how she'd made an impact within her company and also how she had gotten there." "I reached out to her through the messaging system, asking if we could meet for coffee sometime," he told Indy100. "To my surprise, she said yes. We met at a local coffee shop one afternoon after work one week later—and we've been together ever since!" Marketing executive Shelley also opened up about her unique encounter after reconnecting with her teenage fling through the professional platform. She and her now-husband briefly dated in her earlier years, before losing contact, moving to different states and marrying other people. Twenty years later, Shelley noticed he had moved to Denver, where her parents live. "I mentioned to my mom that John was living in Denver and she encouraged me to reach out," she explained. "The only way I had to reach out to him was on LinkedIn, so I did and we got together for brunch the day after Christmas. He had just gotten divorced as well." She added: "Since then, he moved to Pittsburgh to be with me, we survived the pandemic together, moved to Brooklyn last August and are still going strong!" The desire for love can have no boundaries, and people are more willing to take risks, according to Clarissa Silva, Behavioural Scientist, Relationship Coach, and Creator of Your Happiness Hypothesis Method. "All social media platforms eventually become dating platforms," Clarissa told Indy100. "LinkedIn is no exception. It's solving for our desire to find love when other options have failed." However, Clarissa explained that shopping on LinkedIn for a partner based on career may not yield the result you are looking for and you can soon become the topic of their network's conversation. "If you are using LinkedIn because other dating sites failed you, then you might want to reconsider your strategy and freshen up your profile," she continued. "Adding an additional platform to your search strategy also increases your rejection and ghosting rates which can have an adverse effect on your self-esteem." Meanwhile, Stacy Thomson, mental health clinician and performance coach behind the dating app Reddi, believes approaching people on LinkedIn for love is a "big no, no." "It’s a protected professional space, and people should feel safe," Stacy told Indy100. "However, LinkedIn is the perfect place for building relationships with strangers, and networking. This opens the door for the potential development of romance should two people become attracted to one another." "I guess, LinkedIn provides the opportunity to meet people who are similar to you professionally, and also maybe personally who you may not bump into outside of work." We've got to also consider the the power dynamic on the platform, especially when people are connecting over business or future job prospects. In some instances, this could lead to people using "'work' as a smokescreen when they have different intentions" Jordan Dixon, clinical psychosexual and relationship psychotherapist suggested. An example given by Jordan was someone setting up a business meeting with a hidden romantic interest – which would inevitably bring up ethical questions. "However, for some it might be the case that people may start speaking to one another about work and then attraction may fruition from these interactions and this can be very positive," Jordan continued. "We all know that many relationships can be first formed through our work and many people can find career success very sexy, and LinkedIn can potentially feel like a bit of a sexy taboo thing for some because its not so explicit and can be a turn on for some." Going forward, Jordan advises people to always be mindful, act respectfully and with transparency – otherwise it could backfire massively. Indy100 reached out to LinkedIn for comment. 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Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

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