When Shelley Carr matched with a new guy on Tinder last fall who spoke eloquently about art, politics and theatre, she thought she’d found someone she could really connect with.
“I’m sort of an artsy person. I watch theatre, and I go to plays and I go to art galleries, and so I’m looking for someone similar, right?” she said.
“It was like we had the same interests and it’s very rare to have that happen.”
So, she asked him to meet in person to see if they’d hit it off in real life.
But as soon as Carr saw him in person, as he got off the bus in Hamilton to meet her for their date, she had a feeling “that there’s just no way that the person I’ve been talking to was the person that got off that bus.”
That feeling was confirmed minutes later, when Carr’s date told her that those eloquent messages weren’t written by him, but by ChatGPT.
Carr, who’s 56, said she was shocked.
“I’ve dealt with a lot of different things, but never dealt with that.”
Carr’s story is just one example of how AI is changing online dating. But whether that’s for better or worse depends on who you talk to.
Companies have been keen to jump on the AI bandwagon, unveiling new features using AI that promise to help users level up their dating game. But some users, particularly women, say it’s making it more difficult to tell fact from fiction, and making the quest for love more difficult as a result.
AI tools now part of the dating app experience
Regina Hay, a 24-year-old woman living and dating in Toronto, said she’s been using dating apps for years. But in recent months, she said it feels like the use of AI seems to be everywhere from people’s profiles to the messages they send.
This February, she said she was having a conversation with a potential date through an app that was going well, until he sent her a complex hypothesis on Spotify Wrapped that didn’t seem to be written by him.
Hay says he admitted to using AI when she pointed out the change in tone, which made her feel cheated.
“If I wanted to have an automated conversation, I can use ChatGPT, I can get it myself. But I talked to him because I wanted to talk to that individual,” she said.
Along with the proliferation of ChatGPT-generated messages and third party applications like RIZZ, nearly every major dating platform is incorporating AI into their apps in a bid to improve user experience and combat swipe fatigue.
Just about everything these days happens through cellphones, including dating, with users just a swipe and a match away from potentially finding a long-term partner. But some young people are breaking up with their dating apps, citing the desire to find more authentic connections and the strain of not getting the desired results.
Bumble unveiled its AI-suggested profile guidance feature in February designed to give users “personalized, actionable feedback” on their bios. Facebook also claims the AI
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