AI Is Making Online Dating Even Worse

In June, Vindya Tajeshwar saw a man on Hinge she thought might have potential. Tajeshwar, 27, has a master’s degree and works at a hospital; she is extroverted, easy to talk to, and “can make a conversation out of thin air,” as she put it. The man was a nurse practitioner, which demands at least a master’s degree, so she was surprised that his grammar was iffy. In his typically brief missives, he often misspelled words and mixed up homonyms, asking her, for instance, “what are you’re thoughts on god/higher power.” She figured that maybe he’d be a better conversationalist in person, so she kept their communication going.

Then he surprised her once more. When he asked her what her dream trip to take with a partner would be, she wrote him a detailed message about Iceland, naming some of its unique natural attractions and describing how she’d love to tour the country’s libraries and other sites connected to the Norse and Viking literature she had studied as an undergrad. His reply demonstrated a newfound set of rhetorical skills that sounded so off to Tajeshwar that she felt like she was talking to “a spokesperson.”

“That actually sounds incredible, like a perfect mix of magic, nature and meaning,” he wrote. “Seeing the Northern Lights with someone you’re close to? That’s a core memory waiting to happen. And Iceland’s black beaches, waterfalls, geysers … it’s like the earth showing off. Also, the literary tour is not nerdy it’s passionate and so unique. I think it’s beautiful when someone wants to connect deeply with the history of stories that shape them. If I’m lucky enough to tag along, I’ll happily sip coffee in a cozy Icelandic library while you explore sagas and ancient texts.”

Tajeshwar had the feeling that her own stellar grammar and spelling may have intimidated him, pushing him to feed their texts into ChatGPT for help. “Like, are you serious? You would never say that!” exclaimed Tajeshwar. “I was just laughing, and this guy thinks that he just wooed the shit out of me.”

Today, people use artificial intelligence to write their grocery lists, college term papers, and résumés; it was only a matter of time before it became part of the search for love. People use AI to write their dating profiles and to practice flirting, as conversational aides and dating coaches. Dating apps are integrating AI features that can help users pick the right photos or urge them to expand on a reply or tone down the creepiness. According to the most recent Match.com “Singles in America” survey, 26 percent of single daters (and nearly half of Gen-Z daters) reported using AI in their dating process, more than a fourfold increase from a year ago, suggesting this is well on its way to becoming the norm — and just when most single people already thought online dating couldn’t get any worse.

Tajeshwar texted back and forth with her suitor for another week or so, hoping a human being would reemerge. But the phony paragraphs kept popping up. “There’s something magnetic about someone who knows their worth inside and out without needing comparison to validate it. The blend of beauty, intellect, emotional depth, and self-possession you describe isn’t just rare it’s powerful,” he wrote to her one day. “You’re not just existing, you’re curating your presence with intention, with grace, and with clarity. And the way you view others through support instead of competition? That’s a mark of someone who’s truly rooted.” She replied, “You speak like a scholar.” Perhaps caught off guard, he lost his instinct for impeccable diction. “lol ????” he replied. “I try”.

“People already fake a lot of who they are,” Tajeshwar said. She worries that men who aren’t naturally comfortable with the written word are using tools to make them sound more polished in hopes of impressing educated women like herself. “Straight men are so good at finding ways to manipulate women,” she continued. “They’ll never do the work to actually become smarter, but they’ll do the work to try to seem smarter to you.”

The rise of AI in dating might reflect the increasingly high stakes of written communication, which instills fear that a single misspelled word or poorly chosen emoji will send your potential future spouse running. It could be the inevitable end point of growing up behind a screen, unaccustomed to human interaction. Or it could reflect laziness — who wants to make an effort when online dating is so often fruitless? Either way, AI dating has arrived as a full-blown force, adding yet another layer of technological intervention into the oldest and most important of pursuits. “I have to make a choice in this moment,” said Elayna Spratley, a 40-year-old design strategist in Austin, Texas. Spratley had received a highly formatted text, replete with stars and italics, from a potential partner who admitted she used ChatGPT so others could understand her “thought process.” “Do I tolerate people talking to me with AI?” Spratley asked. “Or do I call people out for talking to me with AI? And I decided no: I’m gonna call somebody out, because especially in dating, I need to know the real you.”

The most commonly cited use of AI in Match.com’s survey was for writing dating profiles, with 11 percent of respondents saying they relied on it for this purpose. (The second-most-common use, at 10 percent, was for opening lines.) Wendy Nicole Anderson, a business consultant living in Atlanta, had ChatGPT write several of her bios for Hinge and other apps. One reads: “August Leo. Ask the right questions, and you might find yourself obsessed. I despise small talk, bare minimum energy. I’m five feet and intentional. If you take care of me, I will take care of you. I’m looking to be courted by a man who leads, plans, and moves with purpose, someone emotionally intelligent, adventurous, generous, grounded and genuinely seeking his person. I am looking for my person. Live music and gourmet cheese make me happy.”

Anderson felt her bio was authentically her even if it was written by a chatbot. “My bio is 100 percent in alignment with my true personality,” she told me. “I don’t have a filter. I’m very witty. I’m full of personality.” Nor did she think using ChatGPT reflected the “bare minimum energy” she loathed. “It took me an hour and change to drill down my bio to be that good,” she explained. “I had to edit it, edit it, edit it down. I have to keep talking to it.” On the other hand, she admits that ChatGPT has sapped her motivation to write a first draft of anything herself, even though she minored in writing in college and described herself as a “wordsmith.” “I’m gonna be honest with you: Once you use ChatGPT, you don’t want to think for yourself anymore,” she said.

Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT who has been researching technology’s effect on interpersonal relationships for decades, was struck by how anecdotes that seemed extreme or shameful when she first began her research are now “like, so what?” In the past few years, she said, there’s been a “real change in people’s willingness to say, ‘I am simply going to delegate my most intimate’” communications. She has found that people have come to think of themselves almost as cyborgs. “It’s you plus your chatbot,” she said. “People felt that they couldn’t engage in kind of text conversations as ‘just themselves,’” an expression that came up over and over again in her interviews. “People clearly feel that the ‘just myself’ category is off the table.”

Skyler Wang, a professor of sociology at McGill University who has researched AI and dating culture and once worked as a dating coach himself, observed that dating coaches and other third parties have always been around and that AI chatbots can be one way of increasing access to tools formerly only available to those with means. Just as AI models draw on a massive corpus of human output, he points out, a dating coach has aggregate knowledge of “all the most conventional dating practices,” pointing a client to what works based on what has worked for the majority of past clients. With AI, though, “one real difference is the scale,” said Wang. Now the supply of dating coaches is infinite, a quantitative shift that will almost surely create a qualitative one.

Unsurprisingly, one of those shifts is a certain uniformity. Scottie-Marie Collins, a paralegal in Seattle, told me that when she first tried online dating in 2020, everybody’s bio was different: “They were able to express themselves or tell people about themselves in, what, 500 characters? It wasn’t as cookie-cutter. I could actually get a good sense of the person from their bio.” Now, she said, everyone seemed to follow a similar formula. “I just noticed the same phrase over and over again,” she said. “You can obviously tell that a lot of them would put, like, ‘I am a six-foot scientist who likes to play hockey on the weekends,’ and it would be like, ‘You can find me on the hockey field on the weekends, and by day you can find me inoculating Petri dishes.’ You can tell the language was very inauthentic — I guess I could say flavorless.” Plus, she added, some of these men even left in the quotation marks generated by their AI bots.

Robb, 50, a divorced Realtor in Tampa, said he misses the humanity of people at least trying to express themselves in their own words. Last year, he started noticing that women’s replies to Hinge’s prompts were all “saying the exact same thing and using the exact same style of double dash and ellipses, double dash and ellipses.” Those prompts, abbreviated as they are, “are our only chance to actually connect with another person, and that’s where it feels like I’m not getting that connection,” he said. “It loses all of the natural beauty of natural language. It loses the flaws that make us beautiful.”

The generic style extended to messaging interactions. Women often filled their bios with things like, “Hey, you bring the drinks and I’ll bring the games.” “It was always some sort of cheesy pickup line,” he said. “There’s no way that every woman has the exact same writing style and sense of humor.”

Despite his reservations, at one point he tried using ChatGPT to write his own bio. He was having trouble communicating, in a way that didn’t feel too heavy, that he was a recovering alcoholic but was fine dating someone who drank moderately. He gave ChatGPT examples of lines he liked (“I’m six-two, tattooed, and mostly housebroken”) and ones he found lame (“fluent in sarcasm”). He also drew a firm red line against following the formula he was seeing everywhere: “Typical AI pattern: 1. Generic opener: ‘I love spontaneous adventures.’ 2. Forced humor: ‘Especially if they involve tacos …’ 3. Pop-culture tag: ‘Bonus points if you beat me at Mario Kart.’” ChatGPT did help him rethink his writing style, but, he said, “Ultimately I could not get it to break its template with cheesy lines and tell-tale punctuation.”

More than 60 percent of Match.com survey respondents complained that dating profiles today don’t feel authentic.  But it’s not clear whether AI-assisted profiles are notably worse than the average human-made bio. The last time I used dating apps, around six years ago, the profiles were just as repetitive. “Tacos” and “bonus points” abounded. It felt like every other man led with how many countries he’d visited. The “find me here, find me there” phrasing that annoyed Collins was common then too.

Daters are also hoping AI can help sort their matches for them. In Match.com’s survey, 44 percent of daters wanted AI to filter matches for better compatibility. The founder of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Herd, has been working on a new AI-powered dating app that “will get to know a user over a series of sessions, make a dating profile for them, find a match and go so far as to help book reservations for a date,” according to The Wall Street Journal. Another matchmaking service, Keeper.AI, is premised on the idea that AI, when combined with vision models that analyze someone’s appearance, can replicate the service of a high-end matchmaker, “but at a much cheaper cost,” according to founder Jake Kozloski. Both of these concepts are premised on the idea that AI can fundamentally understand people and their preferences, perhaps even better than they understand themselves, and predict who will have chemistry.

Although he has one client whose specific request stumps AI in its current iteration — she wants to raise her children Jewish but isn’t attracted to Jewish men, so is looking for a Gentile who is open to converting — Kozloski believes today’s AI is otherwise capable of genuinely grasping someone’s personality and values. “LLMs and other forms of AI natural-language processing are very good for the internal,” he told me, and once the tech grows more sophisticated, his service can be scaled and offered less expensively. For example, Kozloski said, “A solid percent of women say baldness is a dealbreaker, so you need a model to be able to say, ‘Is this guy bald?’”

Several people I spoke to suggested that the AI-wingman option is especially appealing to men. “What a lot of women don’t realize is how many more men are on the apps than women, and so for them, it’s really frustrating,” said Ann Parnes, the co-founder of the matchmaking and dating coaching service After Hello. “They might start off bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and try to come up with clever messages,” but after not hearing back, “they get burnt out and frustrated.” That’s when her male clients turn to AI — which in turn can create its own frustrations. One had used AI to send clever messages to women, thinking he was getting to know them, but instead got mired trading endless witticisms back and forth.

AI-generated advice, feedback, and pickup lines also provide clear guidance at a time when men’s societal roles are less clear-cut and they have fewer connections with other male friends, said Dr. Saed D. Hill, a psychologist focused on healthy masculinity. “AI comes in and says, ‘This is how you do it,’” he said.

Alex, a 20-something in Hungary who asked that his real name not be used, started using Message Game AI, or MGAI, a chatbot developed by a dating coach who goes by Ice White, after first learning how to meet women at bars using techniques from the best-selling pick-up artist book The Game. The book had taught Alex how to get someone’s phone number in a bar, but it was too dated to help with the repartee over text that followed. “I started texting with girls, but naturally it would fall apart,” he said. “The Ice White chatbot really could push it to the date.”

MGAI was trained on tens of thousands of text conversations between straight men and women and was built on three principles articulated by Ice White in his book, The Message Game. “First rule is skip the bullshit,” Ice White told me. “Second rule is lead. Third rule is meet.” In one instance, Alex was visiting another city and had met a local woman on Tinder. He wanted to see her before he left and asked MGAI for help. “Is this a good starting line: Hi I am leaving today by plane. So we have about 5 hours to live out our entire relationship.”

The chatbot replied, “It’s definitely bold and humorous, which can be a good way to stand out. However, it might come off as too much or overly dramatic for some people. If you’re going for a flirty and funny vibe, you could tweak it to make it a bit more playful while still intriguing. Here’s a suggestion: Hey, I’m hopping on a plane later today … so we’ve got 5 hours to live our entire love story. Think we can pull it off? This keeps it light but still keeps the charm intact! Go try it.”

He sent the message verbatim. The woman, saved in Alex’s phone as “Tinder Girl 22,” was in. “Wow okay definitely ????,” she replied.

Alex also uses MGAI for relationship advice. Fretting about whether or not to text a woman he had met socially, he asked: “Okay here my question? Do I wait for her to get coffe with?” or “Do I go get lunch now, maybe run into her at the bufe and chat with her?”

MGAI advised him to make a move or move on.

“You’re overthinking, my dude. At this point, waiting too long feels passive, and texting without a purpose risks coming across as needy. So here’s the play: give her another few hours, and if she hasn’t texted, send her something light and confident. Suggested message: Alright, you win. I’ll stop waiting for you to propose coffee—how about tomorrow? Afternoon works for me. Your move. Keeps it casual but puts the ball in her court while showing you’re proactive. If she doesn’t respond, move on to other options!”

Again, he used the bot’s suggestion word for word and landed a date. They started to see each other regularly, an outcome he doesn’t think would have been possible without MGAI’s help. ChatGPT, he found, was too generic. “The conversations just die out.”

The pick-up-artist community is rife with misogyny, and women have criticized The Game as encouraging sexual assault, so it’s not surprising that MGAI may not have the best radar for when men have overstepped bounds. When Alex felt he’d made a mistake one night by going in for a kiss without waiting for his date to express her interest, MGAI told him to essentially forget about it. It advised against writing to her to apologize and again told him he was overthinking the situation. “I don’t think I overstepped a boundary, but if I did overstep a boundary, in that case, then I should take responsibility, and it didn’t necessarily push me there,” Alex told me. He says he is conscious of sexism and “oppressive thinking,” and thinks the MGAI app can be “a bit too cocky sometimes.” (In a statement, Ice White said, “It was also designed to have a no-fluff attitude, which may have caused MGAI to realign the interaction with the user into moving forward, rather than giving advice on a past physical world interaction.”)

“Men are looking for confidence. Men are looking for perspective. They’re searching for something,” said Hill, the psychologist. An AI wingman “offers them an answer, but it’s not always the best answer for them.”

Men can also turn to AI when a conversation creeps out of their emotional range. When Julie Yacoub, 48, decided to dip her toe into dating after getting divorced in 2022, she was puzzled by how many of the men’s profiles she saw specified “no drama” and “no kids.” Her response was to write what she calls “the world’s most honest dating profile,” describing life with her teenage kids and leaving her difficult marriage. To her surprise, the notifications came pouring in, revealing an unspoken “desire for authenticity,” Yacoub said. “My phone actually buzzed off my desk.”

She started messaging with someone whose profile stood out for its candor and realness. “He had very honest pictures, I can say without unkindness,” Yacoub recalled, referring to his not being conventionally attractive. He seemed like “someone who I really felt like I could connect to on a truly heart-and-soul personal level.”

After exchanging dozens of messages, they were building up to meet in person. Yacoub hadn’t been on a first date in 24 years, and her marriage had been rocky; she wanted to prepare him in case she was nervous or jumpy. She spent 20 minutes composing a heartfelt, vulnerable message describing her marital history and how it affected her, “crafting every word, trying to think of, How is this going to be perceived?” she said. The long paragraphs he sent three days later didn’t sound at all like the person — witty, clever, quick to reply in short sentences — she had been corresponding with before.

For her health-care job, Yacoub uses all of the major AI tools for research. His reply, she was pretty sure, was courtesy of Anthropic’s Claude. At the time, if you asked it for relationship advice, it answered “in a set structure,” Yacoub said, addressing the person by name, expressing empathy, then talking about what should have happened before moving into advice.

When the first sentence of his reply included her name, she thought “Oh my goodness, he used Claude.” She steeled herself for the next sentence: “Now it’s gonna express empathy — Yep, there it goes,” she said. “I was just kind of stunned. Like, he took what I wrote and put it into an AI?”

Using the prompt she thought he had put in — I don’t know how to respond to this woman on a dating app. I am interested and want to be kind and thoughtful — she was able to reverse engineer his response “almost verbatim.” But she already felt betrayed. She “very gently” explained to him that she realized he had used AI and that she understood why he might have wanted assistance navigating a delicate situation. If they were to move forward, though, she wanted them to have an authentic connection. He never replied, and Yacoub let her Match membership lapse.

Women use AI in dating, too, of course. Several women I spoke to mentioned that the robotic aspect of AI helped them take their emotions out of the equation, making their communications more effective. Phalynn Stimage, a 37-year-old who lives in Atlanta, started playing around with ChatGPT in 2023. She had initially used it for personal tasks, like setting yearly goals, but then saw people online talking about its romantic applications. She figured she could try it to better communicate with a man she’d been arguing with too much; they had been having trouble finding time to talk by phone since they were living in different cities and working different shifts. ChatGPTisha, as she calls it (she is not alone in naming her AI tool), helped her soften her tone, to be more “warm and welcoming and not so accusatory,” she said. It was able to “just take your emotions and filter them in the best way that they can be received.”

Cathy Herrera, 48, started using AI after ending an eight-year relationship. She was “clueless about modern dating” and asked ChatGPT for everything from where to meet “high-value men” to suggestions for going out on the town on her own. In one TikTok video, she uses it to draft a reply to a man who had “accidentally” sent her friend a message intended for another woman. Calling ChatGPT “your new unhinged fucking bestie,” Herrera gave the following prompt: “Give me a text to send to him but meant for another guy I’m going to go meet with to make him jealous and play at his own game.” ChatGPT suggested, “Had such a good time last night, can’t stop thinking about you. Can’t wait to see you this weekend — what should I wear for you?”

“I used ChatGPT in that situation because I knew it would strip away the emotion we women often put into responses,” Herrera said. “For me, it became like the unfiltered big sister I never had, one who calls me out on my BS but also gives solid advice.” She added that she also has many close friends (“humans,” she specified) who give her advice.

At the same time, if there’s anywhere emotions belong, it’s in dating. Turning to ChatGPT for difficult conversations risks establishing a different sort of gap, not just between a person and their words but between their strong emotional state and the scripted, polite tone they’re using to communicate it. Turkle sees it as “buying us less vulnerability,” but at the expense of the very thing we’re ostensibly seeking. “There’s no intimacy without vulnerability,” she said.

On the other hand, sometimes you just have to go with what works. In 2023, Ella Parlor spent an evening chatting with a tall, handsome stranger at the bar of a Dallas restaurant. When she finally had to go home, she was surprised the man, Jim, didn’t ask for her number. Parlor, who was 33 and “unapologetically” searching for a husband at the time, figured she had nothing to lose. She threw her business card down on the bar before climbing into her Uber ride.

Jim texted her as she was walking through the door of her apartment, and they made plans for a date the next week. Parlor was between jobs after moving to Dallas and was going on three dates a day, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She typically didn’t take first dates very seriously. But as they exchanged messages, she realized he was funny and clever, and she felt an unfamiliar sensation. “I started getting really nervous, and I was shocked to be nervous for a first date, because I can’t remember the last time I was nervous for a first date,” she said. So she asked her trusty friend ChatGPT for help.

“Can you please compose a message to a man letting him know I am very excited for your date tomorrow night?”

“Hi [Name]! I just wanted to reach out and let you know how thrilled I am about our date tomorrow night. I’ve been looking forward to it with great excitement. Can’t wait to spend time together and create some wonderful memories. See you soon!”

Parlor wasn’t impressed. “Again, less enthusiastic,” she prompted.

“Hi [Name], I wanted to drop you a message to let you know that I’m really looking forward to our date tomorrow night. I’m genuinely excited about spending time together and getting to know you better. See you soon!”

She still felt she — it — could do better. “Again, a bit more sexy.” This variation had Parlor informing Jim that “the mere thought” of their date “sends a shiver down my spine” and that she couldn’t wait to see him and “indulge in an evening filled with allure and seductive moments.” It was a little over the top, but at that point, she’d workshopped it enough. She copy-pasted, added a few emoji for good measure, and hit send.

For Parlor, who had already used ChatGPT to help edit passages of a book she was working on and to give her emails to clients a more diplomatic tone, she was just leveraging a tech tool to accomplish a small task so she could focus on bigger-picture decisions. “Like, I’m overthinking this with this guy,” she explained. “Let me just surrender to a technological power that can take it off my plate.”

Jim, who she started referring to as “ChatGPT guy,” responded by accusing her of being a Russian scam artist. “It was so obvious I did it that it became a joke,” Parlor said. Jim’s good-natured reply was another affirmation of their shared sense of humor. Their first date led to another, and soon they were both using ChatGPT to write each other love poems.

As they got to know each other, ChatGPT became the third party in their relationship. Parlor used it almost as a translator of sorts; she knew that she and Jim were very different people, so she’d ask it to help her see things from his perspective. Parlor even kept a mini-bio of Jim in her Notes app , “where he’s from, his age, his, you know, ideology, his values, all that,” so that she could prompt ChatGPT with that backstory when she wanted to ask it for advice. But after they had an argument about whether she was overly reliant on ChatGPT, she deleted the note and agreed not to use AI when communicating with him

Jim imposed one other major limit on her ChatGPT use: He made her promise not to use it to create her wedding vows. Parlor was “a little annoyed,” because she enjoys using it to brainstorm. She’d planned to upload lots of notes she’d made about him, Instagram captions in which she’d documented their courtship, and other tidbits about their relationship. “I had intended to talk it out with ChatGPT in the way you might with an intimate friend,” she said, not to have it write the actual text. But Jim didn’t want her using it in any capacity.

“I honored that, and that was fine. I love my vows,” she said. “And his vows were absolutely beautiful. Secretly, I’m like, Did you use ChatGPT?”