Dating apps are quickly losing their appeal as a jaded, super online, and equally lonely young generation increasingly reports feeling burnt out by the endless swiping.
Tinder believes the solution is in an AI-infused experience.
On Thursday, the company announced a long list of new features to be deployed in the app in the coming months.
As of Thursday, users in the U.S. and Canada will be able to take advantage of a feature called “Chemistry,” which will give users a daily AI-curated recommendation of potential matches. In a press release, Tinder described it as its “AI-powered way of cutting through dating fatigue.”
The AI will get to know more about you through a Q&A, and if you opt into it, a scan of your camera roll to understand “things like your interests, lifestyle, and personality themes,” the company said. The camera roll scan feature is not yet available on the app, but will begin testing later this year in Australia, Canada, and the U.S.
While the “Chemistry” feature is limited to a few countries, users globally can turn on “Learning Mode” if they really want Tinder’s AI to give them a read of their personality and taste. In this mode, Tinder’s AI recommendation system will be constantly gathering information on you whenever you use the app, and will use it to tweak which profiles get recommended to you.
Tinder believes in the feature. According to internal testing, the women who used the “Learning Mode” feature had a higher likelihood of returning to the app within the first week.
The goal is to eventually grow these AI curation abilities beyond a few features and integrate them into the whole Tinder experience, the company said.
“With more than half our users under 30, we’re building alongside a generation that wants dating to feel more authentic, lower-pressure, and worth their time,” the CEO of Tinder’s parent company, Match Group, Spencer Rascoff, said in the press release. “We’re using AI to surface more relevant connections, and continuing to raise the bar on safety so that people feel confident taking the next step. Taken together, these changes mark the most significant evolution of our app in years and make Tinder more trusted, social, intelligent and expressive.”
Also starting testing in a few weeks in parts of the U.S. is the “Photo Enhance” feature that will use AI to help edit the photos you put on your profile.
The company is also turning to AI to address user safety issues with the dating app.
A feature called “Are You Sure?”, which gives alerts to users before they send any potentially disrespectful texts, is getting an LLM-revamp, and so is “Does This Bother You?”, a feature that detects inappropriate messages, helps the receiver in reporting them, and will also now auto-blur any flagged content.
“These enhancements move beyond keyword detection to context-aware understanding of tone and conversational nuance, enabling smarter prompts that reinforce respectful behavior in real time,” the company said in a press release.
Earlier this week, Bumble also made a similar AI announcement, introducing an opt-in AI assistant called “Dates” that will first try to understand more about the user in private conversations with the chatbot and then match users based on compatibility.
Both Bumble and Tinder, once the two dominating dating apps in the glory days of online dating, have been hit by the great Gen Z dating app disillusionment. Match, which also owns the popular Hinge dating app, has been dealing with consistent subscriber declines.
All bets are off on whether this new AI push by dating apps will actually lead to an increase in users, but previous data says “AI + romance” is not the combination young users are looking for. A Bloomberg Intelligence survey from last summer found that Gen Z tends to be uncomfortable with AI features on dating apps, even more so than Millennials.
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