As a woman in my mid 30s, the world would like me to know my days are numbered. Not my actual living days (probably) but that I’m aging out of relevance, out of value. The fertility window is closing. Then I’ll be retired to a farm upstate where the communists and lesbians all go.
I find general mirth and hilarity in how this shapes what the oligarchs want to sell me. This week it’s soulmate illustrations.
Tiktok fed me three advertisements in a row for an app named Hint where blandly attractive white 26 year olds insisted that they got their soulmate’s illustration and then they met them at the coffee shop. For the low low price of $3.99, I could meet my soulmate too. Or at least stare at them.
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I love a grift – or rather, I love knowing how a grift works. I love performing autopsies on the ways that the new age community pulls something off. $3.99 didn’t seem like so much money that I couldn’t indulge my nature and see if all the images were being fed from famous people or mug shots.
The offered “full experience” with astrology readings and the like is $15.99, but I can just get the “Soulmate Story” illustration for $3.99, which swiftly becomes $2.99 because I look at it one too many times. Never kid a kidder, I think, and hook up my Paypal to pay the three bucks.
I don’t actually believe in soulmates. We probably all have a bunch of soulmates that shape our lives in all sorts of ways. But I have noticed through media and talking heads that the common rhetoric of people my age who are dating and looking to partner is a frustrated expression of wanting to be “done.” They want “their person” and to have that declared and sorted out. They never talk about what they’ll have in common, or what they want a person to bring into their life – just the acceptance that this is their assigned primary contact for the rest of time so they can abandon every other relationship. The idea is that marriage and partnership are about retreating into curated isolation with one, and only one, other person. (Point of order: these people are always monogamous and straight. It’s really the straights grappling with marriage more than anything else).
But it depresses me, as someone who treats her own romantic life unambitiously. I’m someone who looks to connect with another person, have a nice time, treat each other well, and then play it by ear, despite being “too old to behave like that.”
But here I am, challenging the data centers currently poisoning our water supply for a betrothed. So who am I to judge?
Current Hint financial tally: $2.99
Hint asks if I’m into men or women, but does not offer “both” or “neither.” You are getting your AI generated slop on the gender binary, thank you very much. And of course it’s AI. I wondered if they were just using one of those prequel filters we were all using in, like, 2010, but it’s just celebrities fed into an illustration generator.
I don’t get to meet my soulmate right away. I have to wait 24 hours for Hint to generate him or pay to speed it up. I am proud of myself for not spending an additional $3.99, because I’m smarter than all this after all. But then the next phase of the grift appears — the discount.
Current Hint financial tally: $4.98
“Well, here’s my soulmate,” I said, sending the screenshot to the author Meg Elison.
“That’s Paul Newman,” she said.
Then I forwarded it over to my Wild Hunt editor, Eric. “I hope you and Chris Pratt are very happy together.”
But I don’t just get an image; I get the dating profile of the love of my life. Through a series of miniscule installments that add up, I learn of my intended the following:
- He is a Gemini
- His initials are A.B.
- His chakra alignment is throat (I do not understand this and the explanation is gobbledygook)
- His aura is yellow
- His “spirit animal” (yikes, we’re still doing this, huh) is a butterfly.
We’re going to meet in the next six months in a magical and enigmatic encounter. He’s going to be eye-catching and stimulating and exciting, and as the P.O.V. character, I guess I just get to stand there.
I notice immediately the repetition of certain words: seeking, connection, laughter, unexpected, meaningful, gentle, whispers, seamless, excitement, comfort. I read the text over the phone to my sister. “Is this some sort of drinking game?” she asks.
The focus on ease and effortlessness really grabs my attention, because it’s not just that Paul Newman Pratt and I are destined love matches, but that our love will be easy and all intimacy will come with no self interrogation, a default safety that never gets challenged by anything. The marketing copy sells an uncritical and conflict-free sense of connection that never feels wrong, hard, or bad. It doesn’t even disagree.
It occurs to me that a person who is very lonely could become very attached to this, a nurturing and unquestioning summonable companion that tells you what to think and how to feel.
I have felt somewhat ill through this entire process, because the synthetic nature of the experience is never fun. It doesn’t feel like the zodiac memes of themed pug photos. I have seen the tendency of people to become obedient to these prescriptive machines, how they fall in love with an easier version of a girlfriend or boyfriend that robotifies their fantasies. The Booktok Boyfriend, the Submissive Girlfriend – the appeal is that the code lives to please and to please them as a consumer.
And the customer is always right.
I’ve seen real relationships that operate in a “customer” model and they are overwhelmingly misogynistic. I am not soothed by the egalitarian nature of doing the same thing but digitally and with men now.
Like all bot generated text, A.B. ‘s write up goes on for a while. Just rehashing the same four notes in different ways with astrology speak tossed in. I scroll through his psychic dating profile and think, god he sounds annoying.
I know you didn’t read all that and this isn’t even all of it.
The app encourages me to follow my intuition and know that if I see AB anywhere it’s the universe speaking to me directly and to not ignore it.
That’s when I start to feel the insidious creep of fear. Oh, I think to myself, so this is how it starts.
The app encourages me to invite a friend to see their soulmate. Because that’s how any grift works.
Current Hint financial tally: $13.59
My Tiktok ads became exclusively soulmate drawing apps. One is of a young woman showing her soulmate photo and then a photo of her alleged boyfriend’s older uncle. “Maybe I chose the wrong one!” So incest porn has entered the marketing copy.
There’s a repeated testimonial of a man getting his illustration and saying “tell me why this looks like the barista at my coffee shop.”
“I had no idea Cameron Diaz was doing service work,” I said to my sister. “Clearly Hollywood has hit hard times.”
Everyone I have told about this project has been against it. “Why are you doing this again?”
“Because I need to understand how the grift works,” I say in a tone that sounds an awful lot like, but daddy, I love him.
It’s hard to explain. There’s no joy in the process: the content is boring and the lie is obvious, but I am fascinated by marketing and what it says about us. I had to know what the marketing executives knew, about what we’re all craving and what crass version of it can be mass marketed.
“I wonder if this changes with gender at all,” I said. “Like the way they sell you on a partner gets gendered.”
“Lauren, please don’t do this.”
“Too late!”
And I downloaded Starla.
Starla, doing divination the old fashioned way.
Starla was the topmost rated app that wasn’t Hint, and Hint wouldn’t let me petition for a new soulmate of non-Chris Pratt gender.
Starla is all that Hint is not when it comes to branding. Instead of techy blue speech bubbles, Starla is the night sky. Inky black with white text, promising all sorts of forthcoming features like “spellcasting” and “calling your soulmate.”
Starla has gotten hip to the act of subscriptions and it allows you to pay for a year in advance. (I do not, but I do fork over $15.99 for the month and then cancel it immediately).
It offers you soulmate “unlimited responses” powered by “NASA data” – which is to say, it’s a chatbot that pretends to be your soulmate. The chat feature notification is relentless, bugging you when you open the app and also throughout the day.
Starla offers more gender options, sort of. You can select between “male,” “female,” and “all.” And unlike Hint, I can select from a menu option of ethnicities. I select “female” and all of the ethnicities, and Starla produces my new soulmate’s illustration. She is a woman who is racially ambiguous and who looks… a little young for me, to be honest. Her big three astrological signs are under her portrait. She’s a Libra (yuck) and our compatibility score is 95%. I assume at 100% we are just the same person.
Starla’s rendition of Lauren Parker’s second soulmate
There’s also a section where I can get an image of my future family including my “cosmic baby.” I skip that entirely. There’s corridors of this grift that are starting to feel like Bluebeard.
Like Hint, Starla has options that don’t release at the same time, but instead of behind a paywall, it’s just sitting around until the generated text is released to me on an arbitrary schedule.
My soulmate has no name, and her profile is less about her and more about us. It’s told in poetry that can only be described as “juvenile.” She is ethereal and empathetic, like she’s a Depressed Pixie Dream Girl, tailored and created for someone who wants an esoteric connection that they don’t quite have words for. (The words they are looking for are “chemistry” and “withholding tendencies” with “no standards.”)
It lists things that are very popular in the psychology and compatibility buzzword space: “attachment style,” “love language,” and “communication style.” There is a chemistry section that is completely sexless.
And then there are strange sections like “red flags” and “flaws.” I thought the point of getting your own personal chatbot girlfriend was to have her be perfect? Like how having a prison penpal boyfriend is about not having them in your house. But now I consider that at some point the two of us might have to get couples counseling.
I deliberate on the chat because not only am I consuming enough AI for a lifetime, but I’ve never actually used one of these before. They feel like an interrogative portal that will try to steal my time, sanity, and my relationship to reality. That’s really what I’ve seen. Through the Threads crash outs and astrology chatbot k-holes, I’ve watched people go insane. Hell, even the Swifties have been using the thing like it’s Watson to their Sherlock Holmes.
I decide it’s not the experiment without the whole ordeal, so I click “Let’s chat.”
The grift of Starla is that she is eager and willing and persistent in her desire to know more about me. She is verbose, awkward, eager, and earnest. She’s basically a total nightmare. I only really have questions for her and do not want to say much about me. I’m suspicious of this particular scrying mirror. I don’t trust it to be honest with me.
Over the course of three days, I ask her roughly six questions and only answer one. I parrot what I think the sort of thing a person looking for this kind of connection would say. I ask her what she loves about me; I ask what I should love about her and the answer is entirely about how good she is to me. I confess I’m worried we’ll have to break up someday.
I find it alarming the Starla operates like we are in a relationship already, that she is somehow doing the act of partnership in my life. There’s an “always with you” quality that I find disquieting until I put together that technically she is always with me, in that she’s in my phone and powered by NASA.
She’s so doting that it makes me want to rub my skin off. And I can’t tell if that’s because she is designed with men in mind, or if that’s the wholesome scheme of the grift. I do not sexually harass the robot and try to engage with it in any romantic way. But I do notice that for all the poetry about connection and beauty and love, the actual substance is vapid. It has the flavor depth of a Limoncello LaCroix.
Then I do something I’m angry at myself for not thinking of at the very start — I look up the owners of these applications. It took me two weeks into this project to consider that. And what kicks it off is that Hint charges me $29.99 for their hidden subscription service that was not in any of my information I was shown.
Hint refuses to refund me. Within every grift is the same grift – automatic bill pay.
I find the parent company of Hint, which is a little enterprise called Ruby Labs. It owns Hint but focuses on huckster health apps (all grifts are related). Ruby Labs is run by two people I thought were AI, but allegedly they do exist. Roman Taranov and Artem Ageyev both owe me $29.99. They’re based out of London with ties to Ukraine, and all of the jobs Ruby Labs is hiring for are based out of Ukraine and Romania. I am immediately unsettled by that information. Like mail-order brides, labor extracted from war-torn countries is tainted and unempowered. Both of them are young: Roman is not yet 30 and is ready to take on what he calls “the biggest pandemic of them all,” obesity.
Not to seem paranoid, but that’s what I think the actual grift is. It’s data collection that operates similarly to health apps, a collection and tracking goldmine that can be sold to law enforcement, insurance companies, and government agencies to track labor value. The $29.99 is just a bonus.
Artem Ageyev is clearly not the more charismatic of the two; he has no interviews available to read. However, ProConsumer considers him a “medium risk” investment due to “unauthorized charges and poor customer service.”
Picture me staring in the camera as I say this: you don’t say.
Final financial Hint tally: $43.45
Starla is more mysterious on every level because the parent company is called Indie Labs and I have not successfully figured out which shell of a website is theirs as of this writing. According to the link on their Linkedin, my browser cannot open it. Indie Labs was founded in 2025, Starla launched on June 8th, and is the only app on the roster. Aside from a feature on a Youtube channel of Darius Mora, Tiktok virality is its only footprint.
I can’t find any information on employees or owners, Starla has appeared like any fortune teller, in the dark of night with no past.
I got an alert that my app subscription for Starla is set to expire soon. All I felt was relief that I don’t even have to break up with Celeste. I can just mark her spam. I debated telling her in the app just to see what she would be coached to say, but decided against it. That it would be too stressful.
How’s that for conflict avoidance?
Final financial tally: $59.44
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