In New Dating App, You Talk to an AI Matchmaker Who Sets You Up on Dates With Strangers

There's no denying that modern, app-filtered dating can be a nightmare.

Apps like Tinder and Hinge are cynically monetized, poorly moderated, and run by shady algorithms. A lot of profiles are fake, conversations don't progress past terrible pick-up lines, and half the people are on there just to kill time. Worst of all, it replaces organic, in-person interactions with mindless swiping and an objectifying outlook, like flipping through a catalog and circling stuff that might look interesting, except the "stuff" is people.

But is the solution to this very real and nefarious paradigm summoning the ill-defined powers of an AI™ model?

Too late. Someone's already answered that question, and the answer is, "yes." Enter "Sitch," a new app spotlighted by CNBC that uses an AI to be your "matchmaker," sparing you all the work of actually choosing how you will present yourself to or speak to the person that you could potentially be spending the rest of your life with (or at the very least, the rest of the night.)

We're not kidding. First, a new user is asked to answer some questions posed by the "matchmaker" about their interests, their ideal date, and deeper stuff like their personal values. You can then view what the AI has compiled about yourself, sorted into categories like "Non negotiables," "Red flags," and "Nice to Haves."

From there, the AI matchmaker begins to look for possible matches based on your conversation with it. And here's the twist: instead of messaging a person you're recommended, you ask the AI questions about your date candidate, and the AI does its best to speak of them in supposedly candid terms. If both (human) parties say yes, then the AI "introduces" them, and they can start chatting for real. So, yes: it's the dating app equivalent of asking a pop-up customer support bot to answer FAQs.

If this all sounds good to you, then great! We hope you're ready to fork over $90 for three setups, $125 for five, and $160 for eight.

Beyond sounding incredibly hollow and devoid of human spark, the potential for an AI to go wrong in this context is astounding; AI chatbots are notorious liars and inventors of facts. Their behavior and responses can be wildly unpredictable. This would suggest that they don't make for particularly trustworthy romantic intermediaries.

The app's creator, the 30-year-old Nandini Mullaji, acknowledged these shortcomings. "It can go rogue with the conversation," Mullaji, who worked on the dating app Bumble's launch in India, told CNBC. "But I think these are things that we're going to be able to fix as time goes on."

Say what you will about it, some users say they're already having luck with their AI go-between.

"I think every date I went on, there was a second date," James Harter, 31, told CNBC. (He added that he met someone IRL and is not currently using the app.)

Karishma Tawani, 35, says she's been on dates with two people so far. "I feel special when I get an introduction every week," she told CNBC. "I wait for it."

Of course, maybe the reason it works is that it's setting you up with the only other people on the planet who are insane or desperate enough to leave their romantic fortunes up to an AI model.

Sitch is currently live in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. It plans to expand to Chicago and Austin by the end of the year, and is targeting a global launch by 2030.

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