Who doesn’t love app dating? The swiping left! The swiping right! It’s all the best! Well, according to Bumble CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, AI may soon allow app dating to get a lot less swipe-y.
During an interview with Emily Chang of Bloomberg Live, Bumble CEO Herd shared some thoughts on adding AI to dating that has some saying, “No thanks!”
It’s not exactly what you might think, though. Rather than dating actual AI (though that feels around the corner too), Herd merely suggests the latest appeal for tech to prevent humans from ever feeling slightly uncomfortable.
Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd says the future of dating is having your AI date other people's AI and recommend the best matches for you to meet pic.twitter.com/9GEEvpuiKZ
— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) May 10, 2024
“Our focus with AI is to help create more healthy and equitable relationships. And that also
starts with yourself,” says Herd. “You could in the near future be talking to your AI dating
concierge and you could share your insecurities.” Maybe it’s just my experience, but telling a robot all your insecurities rarely ends well.
She continues: “And it could help you train yourself into a better way of thinking about yourself.
And then it could give you productive tips for communicating with other people.”
However, it doesn’t stop there. Herd describes another step in the process, “There is a world
where your dating concierge could go and date for you with another dating concierge. And then
you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will scan all of San Francisco for you and say, ‘these are
the three people you really ought to meet.’”
The internet reaction on this one is about what you might expect, with issues ranging from the
moral aspects to the damaging societal ones, along with the inevitable Black Mirror
comparisons:
This is a slippery slope of providing dating platforms your most private and sensitive data - your emotional triggers and thoughts. It may make mate matching easier with your personalized AI, but the trade off is not worth it and devastating if the provider were to be hacked.
— andydrewie (@andydrewie) May 10, 2024
Using AI to create a profile that matches someone else based on the type of person you are is one thing, but AI conversing with AI and dating companies having that data just sounds like a terrible dystopian future where nobody talks to anyone anymore.
— Dwayne (@CtrlAltDwayne) May 10, 2024
that's nonsense. It means no dating. Dating is actually about love, not about "best choice".
— Matter as Machine (@matterasmachine) May 10, 2024
People would do anything these days just to avoid responsibility of actually connecting with a human being.
— Runemir (@RunemirQi) May 10, 2024
That's literally the plot of a Black Mirror episode.
— Joe Turner (@itsjoeturner) May 10, 2024
As several folks point out, what Herd describes not only sounds like a Black Mirror episode, it
literally IS a Black Mirror episode. Season 4’s “Hang the DJ,” to be precise:
If you’ve never seen it, here’s the episode’s synopsis: “Paired up by a dating program that puts an expiration date on all relationships, Frank and Amy soon begin to question the system's logic.”
That being said, if we’ve learned anything in the 2020s, it’s that every episode of Black Mirror is an
accurate prediction.
You can watch the whole interview at this link. (Or just go watch Black Mirror. Same-same.)
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