Dating app giant Match Group — which owns apps like Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid — held study to determine how US singles really feel about the relationship between AI and dating. It turns out that people don’t want AI to mess with every aspect of human life.
Across the industry, dating apps are experimenting with artificial intelligence. Bumble introduced a dating assistant called Bee, and Tinder is spending so much on AI tools that it has 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 18- to 39-year-olds, 47% of singles have a negative view of the use of artificial intelligence in romantic contexts.
This perspective varies depending on the purpose for which the AI is being used. About 40% of singles say they would refuse to go on a date with someone using an AI dating app, and that number rises to 51% among women aged 18 to 24. However, only 12% of 18- to 24-year-olds said they had used a companion app in the past three months, and only a third of those users said they saw genuine chatbot connections.
While Match says people have an “almost universal” disapproval of actually dating an AI, like in the movie “Her,” that doesn’t mean respondents are completely opposed to AI features within apps. Some 64% of respondents said they could see how AI could help them in their dating journey.
If we are meticulous, technicallyevery major dating app has already used some form of matching algorithm since we’ve known what GPT is. This research refers to the new collection of AI features that virtually every app introduces, which help users enhance their profiles, select photos and keep conversations flowing.
What dating app developers should take away from this research is that humans aren’t completely closed off to AI. They just don’t want to be in a relationship with a robot, nor do they want to feel like their dating experiences are overly inundated with technology that feels authentic.
“Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help in the rough, but far from the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they’ll use it to help them build a profile or to help them figure out what to say when a conversation ends, but the actual connection is still theirs to make.”
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 these days 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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