Dating ‘apocalypse’ is here due to AI technology

Somehow dating apps have become even more horrible, with increasing numbers of users outsourcing the process to the machines.

You match with someone on a dating app. Likes are liked, tame but sweet sallies shared, favourite TV shows compared. But singletons in 2025 now face a horrible question: Are they actually talking to an eligible charmer who has gone to the bother of two fingers tapping out a response – or are they one of the increasing number of people turning to ChatGPT to do

their dating for them?

Sigh. The rise of the machines really is here only the Terminator never had to worry about swiping right. (‘7 foot, loves W40’.)

Those looking for love – and seemingly especially men – are now outsourcing the boring, hard yards of finding love to the machines. AI has officially infiltrated and infected the dating world and some users are now spending up to $80 a month to have specifically created AI ‘wingman’ apps craft pick-up lines, messages and even break-up texts.

Users are already warning that things are now “cooked” and the romantic “apocalypse” is here. Fun!

ChatGPT alone can craft “perfect” pick-up lines, provide real-time feedback based on screenshots of how a chat with a match is going, reckons it can help prevent a person getting ghosted, and it claims it can “predict long-term compatibility (not just attraction)”.

Sure thing, (digital) Jan.

But wait, there’s more. There are now custom GPTS products and apps like Charisma Coach, YourMoveAI, WingAI and Rizz, which can craft profiles and messages for you. Rizz says it has already created more than one hundred million chat replies.

Where things get really wild is what AI can do if a user uploads a prospective date’s profile. ChatGPT can tell you if they are telling porkies about their height, work out how much they earn based on the backgrounds of their photos, and supposedly alert you to any possible personality red flags in their profile.

Chat GPT can help you break up with someone. Picture: iStock

Go further still, and as the Financial Times revealed, its deep research tool can create an eight-page psychological profile of a match.

Should, out of such fertile beginnings, great and last loving not bloom, never fear. There are now specially created AI products that will help end a relationship like Break Up Guide which will dumpers on how to do things with ‘empathy and respect’.

Don’t think that all of this AI-ing is just happening on the outer edges of the dating world either. More than 18 months ago, already, nearly one in four Americans were already using AI to help with online dating, according to McAfee. Imagine how many are using it now.

Writer Jess Thomson recently revealed she had “seen hundreds of the same robotic prompt cluttering people’s profiles”, in a piece for The Times.

Unfortunately, man of the one-liners that AI comes up with are truly atrocious. Examples include: “If you had a third nipple, where would it be?”, “Hey, so I’m hosting this charity event next week for people who can’t reach orgasm. If you can’t c*m, please let me know”, “Excuse me, but I think you dropped something: my jaw”, and “Are you Schrödinger’s cat? Because you’ve got me in a state of uncertainty”.

Would it shock you to know then, that, according to Mashable, the majority of people using AI dating apps are, shocker, blokes, ranging from 66 per cent of Rizz users, to YourMove.AI’s rises to 85 per cent to DatingAI.pro’s 99 per cent. (As one commenter on that article wrote,

“This is some ridiculous Cyrano de Bergerac nonsense”.)

Women are not amused. Over on Reddit, the disillusionment, frustration and genuine heartbreak are already very real.

“I mostly see men doing it,” one user wrote. “It’s extremely obvious … Usually it makes the profile read like a resume. I feel like I’m on LinkedIn. And the AI pics are just sad and pathetic.”

Are we really going to let machines pick our partners? Picture: iStock

“I want to date humans, not what a computer thinks a human should be.”

Another wrote: “We somehow found a way to make online dating even more alienating than it is already”.

One male user posted about using ChatGPT for “unbiased dating advise [sp]” and said it kept giving him answers that suggested he was “stunningly emotionally mature”. Commenters responded with, ”Welcome to the Apocalypse” and “I had no idea that society was this cooked”.

Even those in relationships are being caught off guard by the spread of AI and its creating emotional havoc.

One 33-year-old woman had “loved [the] long loving texts” she had gotten from her 31-year-old boyfriend only to discover that he had actually asked ChatGPT to craft messages that “required empathy, apology and understanding”.

“It makes them feel not genuine and just wrong,” she said.

An 18-year-old girl recently posted she had “always loved” the long paragraphs her boyfriend sent her – until she downloaded ChatGPT and asked it to create a “paragraph for girlfriend”.

Chat GPT offers a lot of help. Picture: Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP

Do I even need to tell you the punch line? The experience seemed to leave her confused and hurt. (Though anyone posting to a dating subreddit is hardly in a great place now are they?)

Soon it might be impossible for those in the dating pool to avoid AI. All the major players – Tinder, Hinge, Bumble and Grindr – are getting in on the act too and are working on incorporating AI into their products to do things like come up with opening lines and giving users feedback on their flirting. In April, Tinder, in partnership with OpenAI, launched something called The Game Game which rates your chat-up skills.

Depending on who you ask, AI in dating is either as a handy tool to help the emotionally obtuse or socially anxious or fundamentally dishonest and really just plain old lazy. It can also be both.

Thomson, in the Times, wrote, “When I receive these AI-generated messages, I feel catfished. They may look the way they claim — unless they used AI in their pictures too — but their personality is, in essence, a lie told via the filter of ChatGPT.”

Things might already have gone too far. I was deep in the comments on Reddit when I am across this: “Plot twist: its not a person using ChatGPT, you matched WITH ChatGPT. It’s evolving, its dating …”

I suppose even large language models must get lonely? Everyone deserves love - even The Terminator.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

Originally published as Dating ‘apocalypse’ is here due to AI technology