Almost half of U.S. singles feel negatively about AI in dating, Match says

Dating app giant Match Group – owner of apps like Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid – conducted a study to determine what American singles really think about the relationship between AI and dating. It turns out that people don’t want AI to ruin every aspect of human life.

Dating apps across the industry are experimenting with AI. Bumble introduced a dating assistant called Bee, and Tinder is spending so much on AI tools that it’s slowing down the hiring process. Meanwhile, Hinge’s CEO stepped down last year to launch a more AI-focused dating app.

But according to Match’s survey of 1,000 people aged 18 to 39, 47% of singles have a negative view of the use of AI 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 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 about a third of those users said they were looking for real connections with those chatbots.

While Match says people have “almost universal” disapproval of actually dating an AI, like in the movie “Her,” that doesn’t mean respondents are completely opposed to AI features in apps. About 64% of respondents said they could see how AI could help them in their dating journey.

If we are pedantic, technicalEvery major dating app has used some form of matching algorithm before we knew what a GPT was. This research refers to the new set of AI features that virtually every app is introducing, allowing users to enhance their profiles, choose photos, and keep conversations going.

What dating app developers should take away from this study is that humans are not 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 doesn’t feel authentic.

“Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but no hands on the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they’ll use it to create a profile or to help determine what to say when a conversation is at a standstill, but the actual connection is still up to them.”

Hopefully this message will reach 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 common these days to say you met your partner online, but “his bot asked my bot out, and our bots hit it off” is never going to be a socially acceptable encounter.