A dating app plans to allow an AI “concierge” to decide who you will date.
You would have an AI avatar that is “programmed with your interests, likes, dislikes, even conversation habits”, said Glamour, and this bot would chat with other users’ bots to see if “the two real people behind the bots might be a good match”.
“Think of it like an arranged match – and the matchmaker is a robot”, added the magazine. “Not scary at all, right?”
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‘You don’t have to talk to 600 people’
Artificial intelligence has played a growing role in the dating scene for some time, with dating apps using algorithms as AI-powered dating assistants join the scene.
The ‘concierge’ development was foreseen by the dystopian Netflix series “Black Mirror”. In one episode, Hang The DJ, a couple are matched into relationships for fixed lengths of time by an algorithm that eventually determines their life-long partner. “Needless to say, it doesn’t exactly end well for humanity,” said Glamour.
So the rise of generative AI that can “learn to mimic particular people” has led to “plenty of speculation around how it could be used in the romantic arena”, said NBC News.
Speaking earlier this month at the Bloomberg Tech Summit in San Francisco, Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd trailed a potential new chapter in this story.
“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge and you could share your insecurities… and then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people,” she said.
“There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges … and then you don’t have to talk to 600 people.”
There’s some “healthy scepticism” over whether AI is the answer, said NBC News. Some who commented on social media felt the use of AI in dating would “exacerbate the isolation and loneliness” that “people have been feeling in recent years”.
We should be “wary” of the integration of AI into such “private and intimate spaces”, wrote Noor Noman for MSNBC.
Intimacy is “critical for our mental, physical and emotional health”, and the integration of AI into dating “threatens to further disconnect and isolate us”, and “atrophy the muscles we need to be intimate with someone else”.
So it “feels like a perversion” that the proposed solution to the “depersonalisation and concomitant dehumanisation” of online dating is the integration of AI, which will only “widen the schism between technology and human connection”.
It “may actually have its uses”, said Glamour, because online dating takes “a lot of energy and time”. Jessica Alderson, a relationship expert at So Synced, told the outlet that although you “still need to filter all of the suggestions through your own values and judgment”, AI “can provide a starting point and inspiration” .
But “you can’t expect a machine to do the work for you when it comes to forming genuine connections with other human beings”, so this plan “defeats the purpose of relationships”, she added.
