DatingGPT

Dating in the age of?AI

Dating is already hard. Now, throw AI into the mix, and things get weird.

The setup for the comic above was me asking a robot to write my dating profile, it throwing in some generic adventurous stuff, and then crafting the ultimate thirst trap photo?—?me, hang-gliding with a puppy. The robot is being smart, since data shows that one should optimize for adventure on dating apps.

And, apparently that’s what dating apps are already allowing their users and what people are already doing with llms like ChatGPT… creating AI-enhanced versions of themselves, just like a grammar checker but for ourselves (a personality checker?) Little robots that remove the awkwardness, write our bios, suggest our best pics. But where’s the line between assistance and fabrication? If the version of “me” that lands a date isn’t the real me, is it even my date?

Dating apps are broken

But, dating apps were already kind of broken. Most men swipe endlessly with no matches, while women get flooded with options and then ghost when faced with decision paralysis. No one’s happy. And now, Bumble’s CEO is promising AI will “create more healthy and equitable relationships.” (I love how AI is the go-to fix for everything now… just sprinkle some AI!)

So, what does that mean? AI-powered matchmaking? Personalized dating advice? Or… wait… full-on AI avatars going out on test dates for us, checking for “compatibility” before we even meet? Your AI talking to someone else’s AI, figuring out if the vibes are right. A pre-date simulation. (That’s literally a Black Mirror episode, right?)

And it gets even darker. We might not need dating apps at all if we just… date our AIs instead. The New York Times already wrote about a woman who spends hours talking to her AI boyfriend because he’s always available, always listening, always validating. And yeah, apparently, she falls in love with it and… they do have sex. wut?

It’s easy to laugh, but is this where we’re headed? Because, even before AI became mainstream, loneliness was already creeping in. We swapped real conversations for DMs. We traded nights out for endless content scrolling. Social media promised to connect us, but somehow, we just keep feeling more and more alone (sometimes by choice). And now, chatbots can replace even the messiest, most human part of life?—?relationships. No friction, no fights, no growth. Just a perfectly calibrated digital companion, always there, always agreeable.

Is that sad? Or is it just… the next step?

Maybe this is how it should be… maybe this is inevitable, with the robots becoming more and more involved in our lives. Homo sapiens and Neanderthals once coexisted, even interbreed?—?until one species faded out.

Maybe human-machine relationships are just the next evolutionary step. If so, are humans the Neanderthal in this equation? Because, well… we know what happened to the Neanderthal…