Words by: Abby Saywell
She loves me, she loves me not. Swipe left, swipe right—it's a match!
When it comes to looking for love, we’ve come a long way from picking petals. Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, Grindr, Christian Connection... the list goes on. The digitisation of dating shows no signs of slowing down either, with mobile dating apps facing the latest craze in tech: AI. That’s right—our most intimate corner of the internet is now being infiltrated by something that can’t even feel.
As someone who’s been single since forever, just the idea of joining a dating app is daunting enough. Now you’re telling me there’s an added risk of being catfished by a supercomputer? To figure out if dating apps are already a lost cause, I sat down with Dr Ally Gibson, senior lecturer in the School of Health at Victoria University of Wellington and online dating researcher, to talk mobile dating apps: the pros, cons, and AI of it all.
Dr Gibson likens joining a mobile dating app to entering a whole new world—and says that this is what draws so many of us in. Mobile dating apps unlock a higher level of sexual empowerment, especially for women, by allowing users to take charge of their love lives in a convenient way. Whether you’re straight, gay, bi, or ace, looking for a relationship, hookup, third, or just killing time, anything’s possible on dating apps. The same can’t be said for the offline world, where heteronormativity dominates and community is hard to come by. “It’s so much harder to meet people… the idea of standing at a bar and picking someone up, or even just starting a conversation with someone, is totally alarming to a lot of people, especially young people.”
But what if the idea of starting a conversation with a match online is also totally alarming? (Asking for a friend…). Well, now there’s an app for that. Through her research, Dr Gibson discovered the existence of CupidBot and My Cupid AI, two of the many AI-powered dating app extensions available. Dr Gibson explains that, through these extensions, “AI is used to assist with matching profiles, communicating with potential dates through the chat function—even setting up dates.” These products claim they’ll “filter out the attention seekers,” let you “get several dates a week by doing absolutely nothing,” and offer “instant automated rizz.” (Yes, researching these did make me feel like an incel).
Successful or not, these AI technologies are pretty ethically concerning. Dr Gibson’s main worry with dating app AI is “around who you’re matching with—is it AI or a real human being?” And what does this mean for meeting matches in person? After all, “AI just simply can’t replace human experience and emotion... maybe in the future, but it’s questionable.”
Though Dr Gibson is generally pro dating apps (“but I am so not a black-and-white person!”), she thinks it’s important to keep a balance between the real and digital worlds. A lot of emotional investment can be put towards matches we’ve never even met (and who might not even be real!)—it’s important to get a reality check sometimes, and to make sure you’re still putting energy into the offline connections in your life. This can be easy to forget, seeing as we were basically raised online—but Dr Gibson thinks this can be an advantage, too. “Draw on those skills and that experience that you’ve already acquired, and apply that to then thinking about mobile dating apps.”
So maybe my prince charming is hiding on Hinge after all—I just have to beat all the bots first. Challenge accepted.♥
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