Dating apps exploit you, dating profiles lie to you, and sex is basically something old people used to do. You might as well consider it: can AI help you find love?
For a handful of tech entrepreneurs and a few brave Londoners, the answer is “maybe”.
No, this is not a story about humans falling in love with sexy computer voices – and strictly speaking, AI dating of some variety has been around for a while. Most big platforms have integrated machine learning and some AI features into their offerings over the past few years.
But dreams of a robot-powered future – or perhaps just general dating malaise and a mounting loneliness crisis – have fuelled a new crop of startups that aim to use the possibilities of the technology differently.
Jasmine, 28, was single for three years when she downloaded the AI-powered dating app Fate. With popular dating apps such as Hinge and Tinder, things were “repetitive”, she said: the same conversations over and over.
“I thought, why not sign up, try something different? It sounded quite cool using, you know, agentic AI, which is where the world is going now, isn’t it?”
Is there anything we can’t outsource?
So if you’re a woman in your mid-20s, single, and ostensibly, reasonably good looking, AI can find you a soul mate? Maybe. I mean, you probably give it a lot of information on your preferences and it knows a bit about all the male suitors you ostensibly seek. So there are like ten (or more!) times as many men on these platforms.
What it almost certainly can’t do is, do the same for a man who is below average. It’s just a numbers game at that point. If there are ten men for every woman, then you need to be in the 10% of the best men that women seek, otherwise you don’t have a mathematical shot at finding a mate. If you advertise that AI will find you a soulmate, maybe you increase the female membership and you give more men a chance, but it’s still a gamble and most men will still be left without.
Now if it had profiles on all available consenting adults in the world, maybe? But that would be super invasive. And if it told you accurately (as in, with 100% confidence) that your soul mate is out there but they live in another country, and there’s a 100% chance they will be right for you… do you take the trip? Or deprive two people (you and this other person) of finding their perfect mate?
Oh man. So you log on, and the AI provides you with the right genetic and social combination to make the right kind of kids and be a good citizen and earn social credit. Got a dissident looking for love? Pair them with a loving but convincing government simp who will provide the right eye shape and obedience to Father/ Mother country.
Fate will also coach users through their interactions, if they desire, a functionality Jasmine described as helpful and another user said was “scary” and “a bit like Black Mirror’.
My first thought, too. There were a few Black Mirror episodes that pretty closely mimic this.
