OkCupid Using ChatGPT to Make Online Dating Even More Robotic

Introducing: ChatGPT, matchmaker extraordinaire.

According to Mashable, online dating site OkCupid has already started to integrate OpenAI's ChatGPT into its online service, utilizing the tech to generate matchmaking prompts for its users.

OkCupid has long been known for the many matchmaking-focused questions it asks its users to answer, a practice it says helps its algorithm source potential partners. And these questions, of course, which are designed to help bring humans together, have traditionally been drafted by humans. But now the company is testing whether ChatGPT could actually play a role in the human matchmaking process.

"Daters who think ChatGPT is a lifesaver get almost 40 percent more Matches on OkCupid than those who think it's too big brother," Michael Kaye, OkCupid's global head of communications, told Mashable, "so we decided to leverage ChatGPT to draft our famous in-app matching questions that power our algorithm."

"The chatbot from OpenAI wrote half a dozen questions for us — about everything from what you value most in a partner to how you can balance your own needs with the needs of a partner in a relationship," Kaye continued, "and daters are loving these new questions."

Indeed, ChatGPT wrote six matchmaking questions for the service, all of which were reportedly generated by way of two fairly standard prompts: "what would you ask on a date?" and "what would you ask on a dating app?"

Pretty standard questions, to which ChatGPT — which essentially just scraped its training data for all of the online relationship advice that it could find, diluted that data into a few questions, and spat those questions back out — responded in stride, churning out a few predictable (although certainly practical) user queries:

• Are you an introvert or an extrovert?
• Are you a morning or night person?
• What’s your favorite way to spend a weekend?
• What do you value most in a partner?
• How do you know when to take a relationship to the next level?
• How do you balance your own needs with the needs of your partner in a relationship?

As Kaye noted, the questions did seem to resonate with OkCupid users. The service's many questions aren't standardized; users can pick through the lineup of over 4,000 relationship-focused questions, choosing the ones that feel most important to them. The six queries generated by ChatGPT have thus far been selected by users over 150,000 times.

"Given the success of this experiment," Kaye told Gizmodo, "we'll be adding new in-app matching questions generated by ChatGPT in the coming month."

While Kaye and OkCupid seem optimistic about leveraging AI, as opposed to human matchmaking experts and question writers, to compose their famous matchmaking prompts, they say they're not yet looking to replace the actual user-to-user interaction with AI integration just yet — and mostly, it seems, because it doesn't really look like their users want that to happen. As Kaye told Gizmodo, the service's "data shows that the majority of OkCupid respondents do not think artificial intelligence can replace interpersonal human interaction," with roughly 70 percent of surveyed OkCupiders telling the service that employing AI to draft their profiles or messages is a "violation of trust."

The same can't be said for all dating services, however. Tinder has already started to incorporate AI-generated icebreakers into its platform, while dating app users across the internet, many of whom have actually been using swiping bots to sort through matches for a while, have taken to social media to share their ChatGPT-assisted dating app tips and success stories.

Look, we get it: dating is hard.

But it's also deeply human, and while there may be some legitimately useful applications of AI within the process, it could also be true that using machines to facilitate too much of the process might just make it even harder. Automating interaction does, well, exactly that. And the less we actually practice interaction, the more alien it's likely to get. Only time, however, will tell.

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