A recent study by AIPRM, a prompt management tool and community-driven prompt library, found that around 6 million people admitted to using AI content in their profiles on dating apps. My first reaction to that stat? I was bummed. How can you foster a genuine human—key word: human—connection while relying on a computer to respond to Hinge prompts? I reached out to Dr. Pepper Schwartz, PhD, a relationship expert and sexologist, for her thoughts on this dating trend.
I'm a Wellness Editor & I Have…*Thoughts* About This Rising Dating Trend
Did a robot write this profile?
Meet the Expert
Dr. Pepper Schwartz, PhD, is an author, researcher, sexologist, relationship expert and advisor at Ro, a TK. An Emeritus Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, Schwartz has written more 25 books on the subjects of love, sexuality and commitment, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, People and other outlets.
To my surprise, Schwartz is not entirely against using AI in dating apps. She tells me, “AI is a powerful tool, and I think if you use it as an editor or architect of how to say what you want to say, it's fine in dating.” But—and this is a big but—she adds that if you use AI as a complete representative of yourself, it can be deceptive to the novice person who is meeting you for the first time. “You want to be loved for who you are, so if you use AI too much or too often, you may be misrepresenting yourself—and that's not fair.”
She says that the key to using AI and still being your authentic self is to write a draft of what you want to say and then let AI clean it up. She explains, “If you just tell AI to write a nice letter talking about various things you like, AI will draft it in a way that does not reflect your distinctive voice. Only use AI to make something a bit better, rather than letting it take over your whole conversation and persona. If you do the latter, it will be unfair and might really bite you in the butt when your date realizes that you are not at all like what they expected from your digital exchanges.”
Considering the huge number of people already reporting that they’re using AI on dating apps, I had to ask Schwartz about the future of this technology in the dating world, and what it means for how we start relationships moving forward. “As AI gets more and more popular, and it will, people will get better at picking out what was created with AI and what was uniquely individualized,” she tells me. “Knowing your partner might actually be a digital program may lead to even more caution and more questions to find out who a person is and if they used AI during their conversations…If email or texting is the main way that daters have been connecting, they will start asking each other if the exchange between them was produced or aided by AI. If it was, and a person lies and then gets caught, this will almost definitely tank that relationship.”
The bottom line is this: Using AI on your dating apps isn’t necessarily a bad thing—Schwartz points out that it can help you finetune the thoughts your already having. But it’s important not to lean too heavily on this technology, lest your date feel bamboozled when the person they’re sitting across from is a far cry from the person they were chatting with behind a screen.