AI saves dating apps. Or maybe they’ll finally kill them
The final phase of the setup involved swiping left and right through stock images of people’s faces until the app understood a profile that matches my true “#AttractionDNA”. Despite selecting men and women from various racial backgrounds during swiping, most of the iris I connected to were women living in the Philippines. Iris CEO and founder Igor Khalatian explained in an email that this is likely because it has recently gone viral with Filipino users. He added that the company is working to balance these connections better.
The person I connected to, Chloe, is an avid user of the app and found the ambiguous AI side cool and useful.
“Yeah, that helps,” she told me. “Because I have good friends here.” Despite using the app for the past six months and enjoying the conversation, Chloe has yet to meet in person in person at any of her matches. (All usernames in this story have been changed to maintain anonymity.)
One of the other women, Althea, was new to the app. Sloppy and okcupid. Althea didn’t really care about the AI aspect of IRIS. “I don’t know,” she says. “I think we can find a serious relationship here.”
As I said With the increasing number of women on the app, it was pretty clear that many users were closer to Altea’s perspective than Chloe. Connect with the right people via hookups or dating apps It feels like a number game To many people juggling multiple accounts. Ultimately, everyone feels like the algorithm is chum, even before they get into AI tools. These users appear everywhere they appear to be hanging out by someone else worth finding.
Some of the Grindr users I reached out to in San Francisco are equally vague about plans for AI-powered apps, and what anyone has heard about the Wingman chatbot despite living in high-tech American capital. There was none. As long as it doesn’t interfere much with Grindr’s core goals, this subset of users doesn’t seem to mind the new tools either way.
Another group of users have been turned off to learn more about planning AI features. “I’m philosophically very anti-Aa,” Thomas told me. “Part of relationship building, which is sexual, romantic, platonic, platonic, deals with friction. I think the more organic approach is to not involve AI.” Tomás says that AI features are other Although he admitted that it could potentially be useful to users, he hasn’t looked at the tools for personal beliefs or the real reasons to use App:Sex.
To better understand his perspective, I once again sent a message to Sebastian. Dating appand the hookup he wanted to share. “Yes, man. I wrote after many people wrote it before dropping four huge blue bubble messages together in our chat. His answer is that there are four advantages (better matches, safety) Improvements, conversation starters, profile optimization) and four disadvantages (lack of reliability, privacy concerns, algorithm bias, overreliance on AI) were listed, accompanied by emojis side by side. What Sebastian did It’s immediately clear if you’re doing so, so I asked if the answer was generated by AI. He answers immediately, “Yes. So, will you get me?”