Have you ever outsourced your love life to a robot? Caught yourself venting to ChatGPT about an argument between you and your boyfriend? Well, you’d be part of 1 in 5 millennials and Gen Z who go to AI for dating advice, according to a 2025 survey. And it is easy to see why: a chatbot is unbiased, available 24/7, and always confidential.
Nia Asante, a 21-year-old film student at the University of Stirling, says that she uses AI as a “last resort” in order not to overburden friends with boy problems. “I don’t wanna bother my friends with what I’ve got going on, or if I feel like it’s a petty issue… I don’t know, a lot of my friends are like, headstrong, and they’re like man-haters, so when I know it’s something small and petty, and I know how they’re gonna react, I kinda want an unbiased opinion.
She continues, “I don’t want my friends hating my partner if I’m always going to them for advice on arguments. It’s like a third party that understands and helps me show up more because I don’t have to worry about solving problems as much.
“When I was on Hinge, I used AI to help me with the prompts, because at the time I couldn’t think of things that weren’t basic. I didn’t want to use the same prompts and give the same answers as everyone else, so I’d go to AI to help me come up with good prompts or good answers to other people’s prompts. I still wanted them to sound like me, but I’d just use AI and be like ‘Can you make this sound better for Hinge?’”
Using online dating apps like Hinge can be a long, demoralising process. But users stay hooked as dating apps introduce new features tailor-made to keep them coming back, exploiting their loneliness to make them buy premium upgrades like Tinder Gold, which can cost up to £30 a month. It is unsurprising that 78 per cent of Gen Z are reportedly feeling burnt out from the endless swiping.
Dr. Ellen Kaufman, a research associate at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for gender and sex studies, said: “When we talk about dating apps, there’s also this gamification element that really does make the experience of online dating feel exhausting if you’re at it for a really long time. It can be very dehumanising to be part of that game when all you’re trying to do is find somebody to watch TV with.”
Flirtini, which has a built-in AI flirting assistant, reports that half of the dating app users they surveyed have let their AI message dates for them at some point. A 2024 report by McCafe found that one-third of daters had used AI to improve their profiles
Meanwhile, big-name dating apps are cashing in on the AI boom, integrating it into practically every part of their interfaces.
Just last month, popular dating app Bumble announced that they were releasing a new AI agent, ‘Bee’ which is set to help users find new matches by learning more about them in private one-to-one chats, essentially cutting out the middleman of constantly swiping. At the same time, Grindr, the world’s most-used gay hookup app, has been testing an AI ‘wingman’ to help users come up with witty responses to messages and plan dates.
A new breed of AI dating startups are focused on stopping the swiping cycle. Keeper, a dating app that boasts 1 in 10 of its first dates leading to long-term relationships, calls itself “the world’s most powerful matchmaker powered by AI”, claiming its tech-led “relationship science” can lead to lasting love.
One anonymous person said that their main use for AI on dating apps is to “decode toxic messages on dating apps”. While using AI for romance might be harmless and indeed helpful for spotting important red flags during the early stages of a relationship, users still need to tread carefully because AI has a proven track record of over-validation. A Stanford University study analysed 391,562 messages from 19 users who described experiencing mental harm from chatbot use, finding that sycophancy, or over-validation, was present in 70% of the messages.
By replacing advice from a good friend or close relative with input from an AI companion, we risk missing out on one of the most important merits of any healthy relationship: being called out when you are in the wrong. Chatbot sycophancy could be especially risky when it’s being used for things like solving conflicts and drafting breakup texts.
Liars exist in cyberspace as well. With so many tools at our disposal, the risk of being deceived on a dating app by AI is higher than ever before. AI ‘Wingman’ apps like Rizz or Winggg allow users to send screenshots of chats with matches to their AI assistant and receive instant replies for each message, essentially letting your ChatGPT do all of the talking for you. Rizz’s CEO has said that singles aren’t the only people using it, as partnered people are also outsourcing interactions with their boyfriends and girlfriends to AI, adding a layer of deception.
So, it’s no wonder that we’ve actually become less trusting that other people aren’t using AI. Three fifths (60 per cent) of current online daters believe they’ve had a conversation with someone on a dating app that was written by AI, according to World Network, while 66.1 per cent of respondents to a survey I ran said that finding out a match had been using AI on a dating app would negatively impact their opinions of them.
“I think that anyone using AI to help write their messages is unethical as it is not representative of the person they are. Especially with online dating where you don’t know the person, I think it’s important that you are getting to know who they really are, and not what AI has made them out to be,” said one anonymous respondent.
Others thought that using AI signalled more about the user’s personality, rather than the feeling of being lied to. “Using AI tools to gain more attention on your profile indicates a lack of effort into getting a relationship of any kind. If you’re not willing to put in the effort describing yourself, how are you ever meant to put any effort into someone else?” Said another anonymous respondent.
So, daters, watch out. The person of your dreams probably isn’t using em dashes between every sentence.
Featured Image Credit: Alex Paterson
Student journalist with a passion for music.
