Online daters are burned out. Longtime users are tired and demoralized, and younger users are less keen to sign up. This was, in part, inevitable, as online dating grew from an exciting alternative into the default American mating ritual. But the apps aren’t blameless. Some of the biggest platforms are simultaneously expensive to use and yet still full of spam. Years of growth hacks and design gimmicks have turned online dating into something between gaming and content consumption.
For the companies that run dating apps, this is turning into a real problem — some users are drifting away. Match Group, which operates Tinder, Hinge, Match, OkCupid, and more than a dozen other dating platforms, has a solution. Coincidentally, it’s the same solution that about 40 percent of S&P 500 companies have floated in the last financial quarter alone as a response to their own wide-ranging problems: artificial intelligence.
This week, Match Group announced the formation of a new internal group to “explore ways to make it easier for users to engage in dating apps, provide tools to help users showcase their individuality, and further enhance the safety and accessibility of our apps,” according to the company. Its Q2 earnings letter previewed the sorts of things this group might be working on:
Match Group has activated several teams across our brands to begin working on applying the latest AI technologies to help solve key dating pain points. These teams have been able to rapidly develop new features, with a number of initial features expected to launch over the next two quarters. These include helping users select their optimal photos and leveraging AI to highlight why a given profile may be a good match. We’re also working on larger AI projects that more holistically improve the end-to-end dating experience.
As in a Tinder profile, images can speak louder than words, and Match Group shared an interesting pair of mock-ups:
The first example, which Match Group has been testing with Tinder, shows a tool that purports to offer advice to users about which pictures might get the most engagement — a data-driven version of the ritual of asking your friends which photos to use. The next panel suggests broader ambitions: a system for explicating opaque “recommendations” in plain English. It’s easy enough to extrapolate next steps from these modest attempts at in-app automation — recommended opening chats and responses, specific recommendations about profile text and information — and from those, a transformed online-dating experience, in which highly optimized profiles trade highly optimized messages at increasing rates. A heightened version of the current state of affairs, in other words, “pain points” and all.
This sort of extrapolation isn’t really necessary, though — online daters have been using new AI tools to try to get dates for about as long as they’ve been available. ChatGPT was immediately popular for generating chat responses and optimizing profiles; companies like Rizz and YourMove.ai have sprung up around the concept, according to Taylor Lorenz at the Washington Post. Match Group, in other words, is catching up with its own users, and also trying to figure out how to play defense against tools that are already being used to game their systems, much in the way that the HR industry is adapting to the flood of blandly competent résumes written with the help of tools like ChatGPT, often with AI tools of its own.
Like job-hunting platforms, online dating apps could be a useful bellwether for interpersonal automation. Will a rising tide of clear and concise AI-augmented self-presentation streamline the dating process or make it more antagonistic? Or will it more resemble an arms race? Will omnipresent optimization make profiles more or less honest or distinguishable from one another? Maybe “AI dating” will turn out to be as grim as it sounds, with millions of sexless bots spamming and filtering one another while their operators descend into deeper alienation. Or maybe it’ll just be weird — a novel new interface for the same old routine. Online daters will be finding out soon, whether they want to or not.
