Modern dating is a dumpster fire.
It never feels just quite right. And it takes a while longer to get used to the all-encompassing admin of it all. The swiping, the messaging, the introductions and the constant hum of rejection.
And then comes the maintenance required to get you a date. Cuter photos that feel a little less you and changing bios to make you seem more interesting. Ever-tweaking your desirability and market-value to get you laid.
And now, much like everything else lately, dating apps are converting to the latest religion of AI, integrating the all-powerful god into their services.
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On a good day, AI hands us the tools to polish ourselves over, inflate ourselves with interests, knowledge and language that are not entirely our own.
We have been using it for combating the onslaught of job hunting. But now that very same practice in the dating market?
AI is making blow-up sex dolls of us all.
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Dating apps are now announcing increasing investment in artificial intelligence.
Match Group’s Hinge and Tinder are introducing AI advice for profiles, editing prompts and suggesting ways to make users more appealing.
AI-driven apps like Amata and Iris promise smarter matchmaking by curating the profiles we like and filtering out those we apparently will not.
Bumble has begun introducing Dates, its own AI matchmaker, pitching the technology as a way to reduce the exhaustion and endless swiping that has come to define online dating.
Yes, this may combat dating fatigue. But it begs the question, if AI is creating our profiles, finding our matches and writing messages – who is actually doing the dating?
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Grindr recently launched its AI subscription tier, Grindr EDGE, after trialling it in Australia and publicly debuting it at the Mighty Hoopla festival in Sydney.
The service introduces AI-powered features that promise to summarise conversations, monitor chats, analysing profiles to create insights and curate lists of potential hookups.
Unlike most dating apps, Grindr operates primarily as a hookup ecosystem. Its success is measured not in relationships formed but in connections made quickly and frequently.
And when algorithms optimise sex, they optimise more of it. The rhetoric is always about abundance.
For queer people, this question feels even more loaded – given our proclivities for app-based hookups.
But sometimes it feels like the more the apps promise, the cheaper those connections become.
Did I really decide I wanted to meet this person?
Or did the gAI (as Grindr have coined it) decide for me?
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The other problem quietly creeping into the world of dating apps is money.
We have all heard of the Rose Jail on Hinge and AI tiers will only further exacerbate this problem.
Most platforms now operate on tiered subscription models. Pay a little and you gain more visibility. Pay a little more and you gain better filters, better matches and greater control over who sees you.
AI will almost certainly follow the same path.
Better AI tools will belong to the people who can afford them.
It risks creating a strange class system within dating itself, where those who can afford optimisation have a far better chance of finding connection.
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Still, the strangest part of all this is not the technology itself. It is how it makes dating feel.
AI promises dating success through aiding us to create perfect profiles and efficient matches.
And sometimes I wonder if that efficiency comes at a cost.
In the context of Grindr, the more we optimise ourselves for a hookup and the hopeful glimmer of something more, the more I start to feel inhuman.
Because, yes, I want attention and I want sex. But if it is gonna take AI for someone’s touch, thats when I am slapped with the image of an AI sex doll version of myself.
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That is the sinister future dating apps are heading towards.
Not a human meeting another human, just two AI-optimised online profiles dating each other.
And, will people use it? Yes. We are lazy and hopeless in the face of modern dating.
And when we do start using it, I wonder whether dating will still feel like connection at all.
Or just another system we have learned how to optimise.
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This piece first appeared in our collaboration with Glass Magazine for their Respect Week Special Edition.
This edition explored the new frontiers of sexual health and wellness, from AI to broken hearts to micro penises.