Dating app giant Match Group — which owns apps like Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid — conducted a study to determine how U.S. singles really feel about the relationship between AI and dating. Turns out, people don’t want AI messing with every aspect of human life.
Across the industry, dating apps are experimenting with AI. Bumble introduced a dating assistant named Bee, and Tinder is spending so much on AI tools that it’s slowed its hiring process. Meanwhile, Hinge’s CEO stepped down last year to launch a more AI-focused dating app altogether.
But according to Match’s survey of 1,000 people aged 18 to 39, 47% of singles have a negative view of AI’s use in romantic contexts.
This perspective varies depending on what the AI is being used for. About 40% of singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app, and that figure rises to 51% among women ages 18 to 24. However, only 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds said that they had used a companion app over the last three months, and only about a third of those users said they were seeking genuine connections with those chatbots.
While Match says that people harbor a “near-universal” disapproval of actually dating an AI, like in the movie “Her,” that doesn’t mean that respondents are wholly opposed to AI features within apps. Some 64% of respondents said they could see how AI might help them in their dating journey.
If we’re being pedantic, technically, every major dating app has already used some form of matching algorithm since before we knew what a GPT was. This survey refers to the new crop of AI features that basically every app is introducing, which help users punch up their profiles, choose photos, and keep conversations flowing.
What dating app developers should take away from this survey is that people are not entirely closed off to AI; they just don’t want to be in a relationship with a robot, nor do they want to feel as though their dating experiences are overly inundated with technology that feels inauthentic.
“Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but hands off for the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they’ll use it to help them punch up a profile or for help figuring out what to say when a conversation goes quiet, but the actual connection is still theirs to create.”
Hopefully this message reaches dating entrepreneurs like Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who suggested that dating app users could have personal bots that date other users’ bots. It’s pretty normal nowadays to say you met your partner online, but “his bot asked my bot out, and our bots hit it off” will never be a socially acceptable meet-cute.
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