Can AI Help You Find a Soulmate?
Online daters aren't ready for AI-everything in the search for romance
In case you haven’t noticed, artificial intelligence (AI) is pretty much everywhere. It’s being embedded into online shopping, including high-spend activities like buying a car. AI might be the reason you get approved or not for a credit card or an apartment rental. And don’t get me started on the increasing prevalence of AI in schools, whether being used by students to find answers on tests and assignments or by teachers and professors to get grading done.
So, of course, if AI is everywhere, it’s certainly going to infiltrate online dating. AI can appear in a variety of ways, too: AI might help you write a message, which is increasingly common, or even help you put your dating profile together. But AI also is the backbone of the algorithm, that black box that determines which profiles you see and, maybe even more importantly, who sees your profile. The algorithm is constantly assessing your online dating activities, your logins, your updates, your messages, to figure out what kind of user you are and how to reward you for your time spent.
When you start to list all of this out and look at the ways AI appears in this space, it starts to feel, well, less than romantic. That may help to explain some of my recent findings in a survey conducted with Ipsos, where our big takeaway was that lots of online daters (and even those not online dating!) have skepticism about the role of AI in swiping, matching, and meeting. Perhaps even less surprising: Women were twice as likely as men to have some hesitation around the incorporation of AI into online dating.
There are plenty of reasons why women may have concerns about the use of AI: Look at all of the ways AI can be used to manipulate messages, photos, and profiles. Many people are already concerned that the person they’ve matched with isn’t who they say they are, which makes meeting up with someone a nerve-wracking proposition. This is typically worse for women and gender nonconforming individuals, who are more likely to be victimized. For some people, AI can make an already uncertain process even more disconcerting.
I think there’s plenty to be said about why we feel skepticism about AI in online dating specifically, but what I also think is interesting is how AI is everywhere—and so maybe that’s part of why we don’t want to see it in dating. Certainly, some of this pushback is directly because AI in online dating feels weird and maybe even intrusive. But we also tend to prize dating and romance as uniquely and deeply human experiences, and so for a lot of people, there is a feeling that, maybe, romance should be exempt from over-technologization.
How many experiences do we have left that are truly human or that we wish to be truly human? This is the core question for a lot of AI skeptics (and outright critics). Should AI be used for art and creativity and love, or should it be used for more mundane tasks, those things that don’t require a human touch? Do you want a bot to plan a first date?
I recently read a great article on flirting. In it, one researcher had done an experiment where people chatted with a flirtatious bartender in virtual reality. The goal of the study was to see if flirting with one person—the bartender—could reduce the temptation to flirt with others, especially for those who were actually in committed relationships. A little flirtation is harmless, goes the rationale, but too much could lead to infidelity. A virtual flirt might suppress all of those temptations without bringing another person into the mix.
When we think about dating and starting relationships, flirtation is critical. It’s not just a way to indicate interest in another person, either; for a lot of people, it’s fun, and that fun helps relationships really take off. So, when we see skepticism about AI in dating, I think this is another reason why: Above and beyond the weirdness of AI in this space and the fact that it’s currently everywhere, it’s reducing the amount of fun we might have in creating new connections. In fact, I’ve talked to different people who are afraid that online dating is just going to turn into two chatbots talking to each other, mimicking the people who actually want to date. Where’s the fun in that?
That’s not to say that I don’t get the appeal and even use of AI for help with something like an opening line. In my research, across multiple studies, people worry that they don’t know how to write that killer opening line, the one that will really hook someone and get them to chat more. For those opening lines, sure, maybe AI can help you refine what you’re trying to say. You could treat AI like you might a friend, especially because so many people rely on friends to help with these messages already.
But does AI need to do the flirting for you, the work of being a human, an imperfect human? Let AI do the work it can really do: Maybe AI, in online dating, is best when we think about algorithms, not when we think about message and content creation. Can ChatGPT really be a flirt?
It’s not all doom-and-gloom about the apps, though: About 40% of the respondents in the survey did believe that people could find a soulmate through a dating app. They also did believe that algorithms could help in creating better matches. The real skepticism stems from AI and chatbots, the feeling that there isn’t a human on the other side of the swipe. When people think about the possibility of connecting with a machine, they dislike the feeling (especially women). They don’t want the machine to trick them, and really, who does? ChatGPT is a fun novelty when you ask it to write horoscopes; it becomes something else when it’s writing your love letters.
I think this tells a compelling story about our current relationship with AI and romance online: If an online dater thinks they can find a soulmate, they probably aren’t expecting to deal with AI in that mix. We (the team who helped me field this survey and me) actually use that word in the survey, too: soulmate. In a way, we’re doubling down as researchers on the humanness of what we’re studying here. Can a robot be your soulmate? Maybe, but that’s not what the online daters in this survey are looking for. A soul and a machine are incompatible here. Similarly, then, the openness to algorithms suggests essentially what I said above: AI can do some things, and perhaps it should be left to do those things it can be trained to do well. Not every potential swipe or match will be perfect, but an online dating pool gets overwhelming fast (research shows that people often get overwhelmed at just how many profiles there are to work through). Let AI sort through those potential matches and get them in an order you can handle. This is what our respondents seem to feel. Let AI take away some of the heavy lifting of swiping, but don’t let AI take away the most human parts of the process.
After all, we’ve already transported something deeply human into another app and another commodity. You can already buy a subscription to an app (as I’ve written about before). Do we need to further reduce the humanity of online dating with a series of chatbots that do the swiping and the flirting?
Probably not.