AI Wants to Be Your New Matchmaker

The dating apps are evolving...and I think we all have an idea how exactly. The intersection of AI and dating has increasingly overlapped over the past year and now, the bots aren’t just helping people sext, suggesting date ideas, or creating AI-gap relationships. They want to play cupid.Back in May, Bumble announced that it was removing its swiping feature to instead use an AI matchmaker. Ditto, a dating app that is only available to college students 18 and older, is pretty similar. Users tell it their dating and partner preferences in app by 11:59 p.m every Tuesday. Then, by Wednesday night, Ditto will send a text with the one match it's found for them, along with photos of the person and a few words on why it paired them together. It also will send a curated date idea, too. All the matches have to do is schedule the date and go on it. For safety, dates only happen at “carefully selected” places throughout campus.And then there’s Overtone. The app was created by former Hinge founder and CEO, Justin McLeod. He stepped down from his post at the end of last year to create his latest relationship tech, which is set to be released later this year, and in his words, Overtone is not a dating app at all, actually—it’s “a service,” according to a recent memo. As in, a matchmaking service.On Overtone, there’s no swiping, likes, matches, photos, algorithms, or generally anything we’ve come to know about dating sites and apps. Instead, the app will get to know you, wrote Justin, and then it will give you one match based on what you told it.“Matchmaking has a rich tradition. For most of history, in most of the world, people met their partners through an introduction made by someone who knew them both. The networks were small, and the matchmaking varied in its wisdom. But we understood that finding a partner is one of life’s hardest and most consequential decisions, and we didn’t have to do it alone,” McLeod said in the memo.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.He continued: “Which is why I believe it’s time to bring back matchmaking. But this time with the reach and diversity of modern networks, the collective wisdom of relationship science, and the conviction that when it comes to options, all you need is less™.”The man isn’t wrong. Matchmaking is a bit of a lost art. It was rooted in community and a deep knowledge of one another—from life visions and ambitions to family dynamics and core values. It required mutual trust and understanding. And it was inherently vulnerable.The robots stepping in to fill this gap has me split in two. So much of dating apps is about swiping to hopefully find someone you click with to then hopefully go on a date, and the endlessness can absolutely be tedious. Actually going on the date is when the real fun—and real assessment—begins. If a robot can take out all that pre-work to get you to the end goal faster, then I can see the temptation to outsource the tiresome, mind-numbing sifting of the riff-raff to the droids.At the same time, though, what does this type of outsourcing say about where we’re headed? This feels like just another way for AI to replace the village many of us say we need and desire. Instead of telling a close friend all the things you hope for in love, and going back and forth on various candidates’ qualities together, swiping on the hard no’s, or them having a light-bulb moment and saying, “I know the perfect person!”, we’re handing that vulnerability, intimacy, self-awareness, and self-assessment over.Admittedly, telling a bot seem safe, insular—like you can reach into the depths of your heart and spill it out and no one will ever really know except the data center. But doing that same thing with a loved one is so rich, so fulfilling, and ultimately strengthens your relationship with that person and helps you understand yourself.Finding love should feel like a group project. Maybe these new advances in dating technology can be a contributing member, one of the tools we reach for to find it, but it can’t be the only one in charge of the grade.