You’ve just matched with someone on a dating app who looks like a good prospect; their pictures look great, their chat is strong and they’ve even suggested some great first date ideas. You may have matched with someone who seems organically well suited to you, but increasingly the likelihood is that person may have had some help. AI it seems is no longer a distant futuristic prospect, but an increasingly real part of dating.
AI features are already being introduced on some apps. Teaser AI has a chatbot mimicking your personality that talks to your matches for a period of time to ease dating app burnout and reduce users experiencing things like ghosting. CupidBot, which is largely aimed at straight men, “swipes and chats for you on dating apps so you can skip to the good part”. Match Group, which owns the dating apps Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid, recently announced that it will be offering artificial intelligence services to help you choose the best photo.
On TikTok, people are already demoing how to use external AI tools like PhotoAI.Me or Adobe AI to generate better images of yourself for your profiles — you can create exciting new backgrounds, remove blemishes and give a high quality model-esque look to your photos. You can use Chat GPT to finesse your dating app bios, think of great first date ideas, generate smoother chat-up lines and even assess your compatibility with current or previous partners. Some are optimistically predicting AI could “reinvigorate how we find and talk to partners online” because, who can really be bothered any more with the admin of swiping constantly, or the boring initial processes of talking to someone new? But is it really the answer to our dating woes?
There are obvious issues with the current dating status-quo. Online dating doesn’t translate enough into meeting up in real life. Trying to be the best version of yourself all the time to impress others can feel exhausting. For marginalised folks, the superficiality of apps can heighten being at the sharp end of desirability politics. Heterosexual women appear to be choosing to be single over the “trauma” of dating men, and the deception and superficiality of online dating is a large contributing factor. Heterosexual men also seem disappointed; a common perception being that dating apps facilitate a small number of attractive men dominating the dating world and leaving fewer options for the rest. It’s rare to find many who think technology has improved their dating lives for the better.
AI offers an enticing way to “outsource” this effort, particularly at a time when many of us are overworked from just trying to pay the rent and afford our weekly food shop. If you’re tired of initial “what’s your favourite TV show atm?” chit chat, an AI bot could do that for you, allowing you to step in once a more exciting flow of conversation has started. The flourishing of attraction between yourself and someone else could be happening with no energy exerted from you. An AI bot can analyse messages between you and your significant other to determine how compatible you are, and potentially save you from issues later down the line.
But there are problems with this approach. AI seems to further perpetuate the idea that like everything else in life, dating just needs to be more efficient, continuing a depressing trend of marketisation in love and romance. Under capitalism, everything in our lives must be productive, no unnecessary steps taken. Life experiences become a project, which takes up as little time of yours as possible. Attempting to outsource your disappointment to a chatbot feels like denying something unavoidable about love: sometimes it hurts. An AI bot sifting through users based on a wish-list of what you think you want in another person seems ripe for further entrenching rigid, superficial theories about who we think we desire, and removing those wonderful moments of surprise when you connect with someone unexpectedly.
All this streamlining further removes us from our most intimate relationships, and romance is framed as a means to an end, rather than a holistic journey of building a bond with another person and experiencing both the good and difficult aspects that comes with it. The lack of effort required by us with AI, means matches could seem even more disposable. We might end up caring even less when the opportunity to connect presents itself; and our dissatisfaction continues.
AI also promises to optimise you: craft the best possible photos of you, generate the best possible description of your life, the best possible chatter. AI treats attraction as something logical. But finding someone attractive isn’t often about them seeming flawless, or algorithmically matching two people together with an identical set of criteria. Sometimes, we like people for bizarre, ineffable reasons. We’re interested in the mundane silly aspects of a person we like as much as the big life stuff. Such a polished approach suggests that love happens to people who have “fixed” themselves, which is circling back to some pretty old-fashioned ideas. None of this sounds like a particularly radical or utopian way to think about relationships.
Sophie K Rosa writes in Radical Intimacy that dating apps require “self-commodification”, understanding yourself as a product in the marketplace that must be improved to beat your competition in the dating industrial complex. This outlook can be taken to an extreme in the manosphere, where “romantic intimacy and sex are something to be won and women are rendered property commodified with vary degrees of value”. Sophie argues that this world view leaves certain men unable to attain women who meet patriarchal beauty standards, viewing themselves as “losers”. Much like the pickup artist industry exploits men’s patriarchal expectations for profit, AI could easily be used to manipulate or coerce women into sex. AI is then just another tool for men to “game the system” in an attempt to attain conventionally attractive women. Some men are even paying subscriptions for an AI girlfriend, allowing them to create wholly online partners whom they can completely control and meet their every need.
Then there is the obvious question of whether using AI is inherently deceptive. Sourcing help and support from others in dating is not necessarily something new; friends and family have long been providing advice on romantic ideas, or how to craft a standout chat up line. A hallmark card communicates an expression of love on our behalf. But the ease at which you could access reams of manufactured content and spew that out to dozens of people at once, does feel disingenuous. It seems many agree; OK Cupid surveyed 30,000 users and 7/10 daters apparently believe using AI to create a profile or message others is a violation of trust. Deception in dating already happens of course — a common bugbear of online daters is that there is a gulf between someone’s online profile and who they are in person — but AI usage may only make that gulf even bigger.
At what point will users decide to remove AI involvement in their flirty conversations? It’s arguably a mood killer to have to suddenly announce the last few paragraphs sent weren’t actually from you but a robot. At some point real people have to take over; if most of your conversation has been two computers talking to each other before meeting, that sounds like an even bigger recipe for disappointment in real life.
Under the guise of female self-empowerment, some TikTok tutorials with hundreds of thousands of likes, showcase how to use AI to make your partner jealous by generating false images of yourself in the club with men, or a conveniently handsome man coming over to fix your shower. This is part of a wider ideology peddled to women online, that they need to lie to or manipulate men in order to feel less vulnerable and regain control of their love lives. Being able to defy the disappointments of patriarchy with AI could well feel like a tempting option for women who are tired of feeling romantically disappointed, but it can’t be a healthy one.
AI is not the root cause of these issues, but it seems simplistic to pretend that under the current systems we live in, AI won’t become just another conduit of undesirable or problematic behaviour. The promise of AI dating feels like a false one, capitalising on people’s natural desire for romance and love whilst, in reality, offering very little to be optimistic about.