Match Group, the dating app giant that owns apps like Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid, conducted a survey to find out how American singles actually feel about the relationship between AI and dating. As it turns out, people don’t want AI to intervene in every aspect of human life.
Across the industry, dating apps are experimenting with AI. Bumble has introduced a dating assistant named Bee, and Tinder is spending a lot of money on AI tools, slowing down its hiring process. Meanwhile, Hinge’s CEO stepped down last year to fully launch an AI-focused dating app.
However, a Match survey of 1,000 people between the ages of 18 and 39 found that 47% of singles have a negative view of the use of AI in relationships.
This perspective depends on what AI is used for. Around 40% of singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app, and that number rises to 51% for women aged 18-24. However, only 12% of 18-24 year olds said they had used a companion app in the past three months, and only about a third of them said they were looking for a genuine connection with those chatbots.
Match says there is a “near universal” aversion to actually dating an AI, much like in the movie “Her,” but that doesn’t mean respondents are completely opposed to AI features within apps. Approximately 64% of respondents said they could understand how AI could help in the dating process.
Technically speaking, all major dating apps already use some form of matching algorithm, even before we knew what GPT was. The study points to new AI features that essentially all apps are introducing to help users enrich their profiles, choose photos, and keep conversations flowing.
What dating app developers should take away from this study is that people aren’t completely closed off to AI. Not only do they not want to associate with robots, they also don’t want their dating experience to feel like it’s over-inundated with technology that feels inauthentic.
“When you ask single people what they want from AI in dating, the answers are pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but not the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they use it to enrich their profile or figure out what to say when the conversation goes silent, but the real connection is still what they build.”
I hope this message gets through to dating entrepreneurs like Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who suggested that users of dating apps could have personal bots that date other users’ bots. It’s commonplace these days to say you met your partner online, but “his bot asked my bot out on a date and our bots hit it off” is not a socially acceptable way to describe a date.
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