Dating app burnout is defined by exhaustion from long-term, disappointing use of dating apps. According to a 2023 study, Americans typically need about 4,000 swipes over an eight-month period to find a partner on a dating app. That same year, Pew Research Center found that 46 percent of dating app users said their experiences with dating apps were generally very or somewhat negative.
You get the idea: things are bleak in the dating world.
Now developers claim that artificial intelligence will lighten this weight. Bumble just announced their Deception Detector, an AI feature designed to identify fake profiles and solve catfishing. TextsFromMyEx.com offers an AI-powered compatibility analysis of your texts with your ex. YourMove.AI and Winggg offer conversation suggestions for dating apps and text messages. And similarly, Rizz.app offers free and paid "rizz" - Gen Z parlance for charisma - to users.
"Many go to Reddit to ask for help. Or ask their friends for advice. Most simply can't afford a dating coach," one of Rizz's co-founders wrote in a post on Reddit. "I believe AI can level the playing field, allowing people to improve their flirting skills and increase confidence when interacting with new people."
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Rizz's AI "guides" or coaches daters on how to start a conversation and keep it going, whether through dating apps or through texting or other messaging apps. Users simply upload a bio to a dating app and the bot tells them how to start a convo. Or they can upload a conversation and it will give advice on how to participate. At the touch of a button, collection lines are automatically generated, such as:
"Do you like bacon? Do you want to strip?"
"If I said you had a nice body, would you hold it up to me?" 'I'd like to kiss those luscious lips. And the one on your face."
"I may not go down in history, but I will go down on you."
Most of the current suggestions fall somewhere on the spectrum from rephrased observation in response to an uploaded biography or conversation from a dating app to dated, misogynistic jokes that could easily be interpreted as sexual harassment by a recipient on a dating app. AI's general inability to empathize is clearly reflected in Rizz's suggestions.
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The app's user base consists largely of men, says CEO Roman Khaves GQ. The team that trained the AI was all men who dated coaches because they coached men. Therein lies the problem: the fact that Rizz was trained by just now men could be creating an echo chamber effect - ultimately letting the blind lead the blind in their quest to impress and attract women.
(When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Rizz told The Daily Beast that there are women on the team, but they chose not to comment on whether or not the way the AI is being developed or changed changed.)
Feeding an AI a dataset from a single perspective has implications beyond the individual user. "In any age of technology, we are faced with a level of benefits and then certain liabilities and spaces that we can't really analyze and understand until they happen in real time," Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist, told The Daily. Beast.
That has not dampened the app's popularity. For a brief moment in 2023, Rizz was the most downloaded lifestyle app on the Apple App Store (it's around 25th at time of reporting), and they boast a staggering "50 million responses generated" on their app store- page.
This influx of users means that Rizz could further exacerbate already broken societal norms. A generation of young men who emerged at a time when they heard the president recommending grabbing women by the pussy and with loud influences like Andrew Tate who relied on such chatbots to advise them on social cues are pouring gasoline on an already burning fire driven by AI and male loneliness
"These are not just small suggestions and preferences. It is in these rooms that we begin to create what is the standard in society," Boateng said. "It becomes things like policy and law, education in universities and it has a way of digging into what we're supposed to be and how we're supposed to respond."
Artificially clumsy
Ed Watal is the founder and director of Intellibus, an IT strategy consultancy. He cites Uber as an example of how these technologies are changing policy. "Uber challenged the status quo of the current fabric of legal infrastructure. It was less of a technological solution," he told The Daily Beast. The app and its subsequent ride-sharing predecessors have been the catalyst for new laws around the world.
Currently, state-by-state AI regulations are slowly but surely being proposed in the US, but these are largely focused on ethical use by companies and to resolve potential litigation risks. This allows ordinary Americans to navigate consumer concerns themselves.
With data and technology, the obvious impulse is to make things efficient. Boateng compares this flight with AI for social signals to that of SparkNotes. "Once you discover the shortcut, sometimes there's a tendency to want to rely on it because it has some inherent advantages," she said.
Sure, it might save time if an AI generates conversation starters to swipe through thousands of dating app bios, but at what cost? Users may think they can escape the feelings of failure, challenging conversations, or rejection in the name of convenience and efficiency, but this will be to their detriment in the long run.
"The challenge with AI is that no matter how specialized we are in artificial intelligence, there is something intangible happening between human and human that cannot be replicated," Boateng said. "The emotional intelligence and knowledge of ourselves that we gain when we have to navigate conflict or negotiate love and friendship, these things that we have to learn and develop over time, cannot be done artificially."
Moreover, the bias that arises from homogeneous data will only produce output from a limited perspective. Rizz's current suggestions are ripe to attract daters who want to talk about sex with complete strangers first. This ignores a large number of daters who may prefer not to be sexually harassed by strangers they have met.
Watal has a theory called the screen hypothesis to explain this. He says to imagine a football match and everyone present takes in a different perspective of the same moment. While there will be undeniable facts, such as which team and which players are on the field, the moment, according to the recordings, is every person's perspective.
"The sum-total version of the truth is the sum of all recordings or all perspectives. To find the whole truth, you need to capture every possible witness to the event and get every possible perspective," he said. Without this approach to ethical data input into an AI, AI will continue to learn from a defined perspective and further inherent biases.
How this translates for those in need of a dating assistant: Their route to human connection becomes homogeneous with the larger group, that of a particular perspective and further removed from the development of the self.
Boateng emphasized how this prevents people from knowing themselves. "If we are poorly educated, we miss a color, the texture and the nuance that really makes life beautiful and that actually comes from diversity and difference," she says. "It's a short-sighted view of the world."
While there are clear benefits to AI, the desire to use the technology for innately human things like emotional development is woefully misplaced, especially at a time when the US is in the midst of a loneliness epidemic.
There is room for improvement in the areas of emotional education and the benefits of forging healthy connections for Americans. Meanwhile, the need for education around AI, not only in terms of security, privacy and for business, but also how it is used on a personal level and especially in terms of additional human connection, is becoming increasingly urgent, especially as the loneliness of men has increased. associated with violent extremism.
When it comes to building relationships, we forget to know ourselves enough to get to know others in the name of efficiency and getting to an arbitrary result faster. If you have a hard time with people, perhaps we should consider the benefits of connecting with other living things, such as pets or caring for plants, before learning to date based on an algorithm whose calculations will never replicate empathy or love for oneself or others or literally one of the best feelings in life.
"My fear is that we are becoming increasingly emotionally malnourished and underdeveloped," Boateng said.
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