You might’ve heard about human-AI relationships, but what would you do if AI was trying to sabotage your dating life with fellow humans? That’s a question more and more romantic hopefuls are grappling with thanks to the troubling rise of AI-powered wingmen.
It’s a phenomenon tied to the prevalence of text-based apps in dating. Recent surveys show that one in five adults under 30 met their partner on a dating app like Tinder or Hinge, and more than half are using dating apps. For years, app-based dating has been regarded as a profoundly alienating experience, a paradigm shift which coincides with a rapid rise in social isolation and loneliness.
The rise of large language models (LLMs) — AI chatbots built to keep users engaged in question-and-answer loops — has only made this situation worse, as relationship seekers outsource their flirting to an algorithm.
Fresh reporting by The Guardian detailed some cases where AI wingmen went so far off the rails, one has to wonder what the end-game even was.
One story involved a 32 year old man named Rich, who used ChatGPT after exchanging social media information with someone he met on a Friday night at the bar. Following the chatbot’s advice, Rich ghosted his new acquaintance for two days, refusing to message her until Monday morning to “set the right pace.”
Though he appeared to be blowing her off, he was really spending his weekend meticulously crafting the perfect opening message with ChatGPT. “Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency,” the bot advised, according to The Guardian.
In the end, he went with a staggeringly bland “Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you” — a message he evidently would’ve struggled to come up with on his own. Sadly, she ghosted him in return. “It’s been two weeks now,” he lamented to the paper.
In other cases, ChatGPT’s cloying advice makes for a pretty obvious red flag. Nina, a 35 year old woman who’s been single for three years, told The Guardian she recently got the opening line, “your smile is effortlessly captivating” on a dating app. “No one talks like that” she said, adding that she hasn’t replied.
For those on the receiving end of AI-generated rizz, the phenomenon — commonly called “chatfishing” — can result in some pretty disappointing dates.
For the 36 year old Rachel, the realization came after spending three weeks getting to know a potential match on Hinge. The man seemed thoughtful, she told The Guardian; “It was like he was genuinely trying to get to know me on a deeper level,” she said.
After meeting at the bar, however, it became obvious that he wasn’t actually the sensitive, confident man he presented himself as — ChatGPT had helped him secure the date, but when he was forced to meet face-to-face, he couldn’t summon up any appeal himself.
“I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she said. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me.”
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