Jenny and Chrissy are like a lot of the young grads streaming into San Francisco these days. The identical twins graduated last year with degrees in computer science from an elite university (Princeton), they work in AI, and they excel at making the technology do difficult things — like producing videos of real-looking humans having real-sounding conversations. But the sisters, who prefer to keep their last name private, are ahead of their years when it comes to an age-old complaint about San Francisco: the miserable dating scene.
This month, the sisters posted an AI-generated video to Instagram with the caption “Imagine Tech and the City — like SATC but about finding love in San Francisco.” Set to the familiar “Sex and the City” soundtrack, the video opens with the question: If the gender ratio in San Francisco is supposedly so great, why are so many great women still single? (Although San Francisco regularly appears on lists of cities with the most eligible men per women, it has earned a reputation for being a terrible place to date.)
The video answers its question through a series of quick monologues representing every bad city stereotype: the self-aggrandizing “LinkedIn thought influencer,” the startup founder with the impenetrable business idea, the venture capitalist who Venmos you for coffee. “If you’re a guy in SF and dating, you’re NGMI,” one character deadpans. “Here are 10 startups you should have started yesterday.”
The video, posted June 5, quickly racked up 1.3 million views and more than 40,000 likes, as well as hundreds of commiseratory comments. “i love sf so much but this HURTS how real this,” one viewer wrote. “LOLL painfully accurate but this is so fire,” another commented. Another user joked: “Literally let me show this to my mom as to why I’m not dating rn.”
The sisters told The Standard the video was inspired not by their own experiences — neither is dating much right now — but by the horror stories they’d heard from coworkers and friends since moving to San Francisco last year.
“We have a lot of girlfriends who are amazing and ambitious and have great pedigree, and they complain about the struggles they have,” Chrissy said. “And then we have guy friends who also complain about their problems. We’re sort of the middleman; we just kind of observe these things. These are great people — ambitious, smart. Why is there so much struggle?”
After a recent rewatch of “Sex and the City,” Jenny felt inspired to make something reflective of the quixotic SF dating scene. The sisters were already content creators, running a YouTube account where they post longform animations about women in tech, and had recently branched into shortform content on Instagram. They spent a day writing a script based on the worst dating stories they’d heard — and their favorite viral tweets on the subject — then put it into an AI video generator.
The resulting video is not their most viral, but it has gotten them the most attention. Chrissy said she was recently at a conference where it felt like she was approached “every five minutes” by someone who’d seen it. Multiple Silicon Valley executives have reached out to the twins to say they liked the video, and a TV writer slid into their DMs hoping to learn more. Jenny said a friend recently told her the video was one of the reasons an acquaintance decided not to move to SF.
The twins have also heard from viewers who are upset with them for using AI to create the video, rather than real actors. Jenny insists this is part of the joke; that the use of AI on the video only emphasizes SF tech workers’ reliance on it. But the sisters are invariably biased by the fact that they work in AI, and by their excitement about its potential uses.
“We’ve had friends say, ‘I had no idea that it was AI until you told me,’’’ Chrissy said. Jenny cut in: “And that’s the crazy thing about all this: What we’re seeing right now is the worst it’s going to be from now until the future. It’s only going to keep getting better.”
Since the video went live, women have been flooding the twins’ inbox with their own stories: the tech bro who refused to go on a date with a woman because her Oura Ring sleep score was too low, or the startup founder who was dating four women at once in order to “optimize” his results. They also heard from a man who said he struggled with dating because he was too muscular to fit the nerdy stereotype of a classic SF tech bro. “That sounded a little like a humblebrag to me,” Jenny said.
After wading through hundreds of horror stories, the twins have arrived on a theory of the problem: The ambitious, high-pressure world of startups doesn’t always translate well to the deeply human experience of finding a relationship, and people who try to optimize or automate their way into love are missing the point.
“People will carry a lot of principles that they see working in their work and try to apply it to their relationships,” Chrissy said. “They’ll really try to optimize things, and they’ll forget about some very basic things, like chivalry.”
“I think that mindset is like, ‘Once I get a billion dollars, then all my relationship problems will be solved,” her sister added. “But in reality, if you know to hold open the door, like, be a good listener — all these things — then you’ll do very well.”