What if your next romantic partner was not chosen by you? What if a machine, which claims to understand you better than yourself, were in charge of choosing who you fall in love with?
That day has come.
Dating apps are now offering AI-powered solutions, poised to replace the habit of endlessly swiping until you find “the one.”
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Highlights
- Gone are the days of swiping left and right to find “the one.”
- Dating apps are now offering AI-powered solutions that claim to make the first move better than you.
- Some users find it helpful, while others find it eerie to leave their fate in the hands of AI.
- “We're building an app that removes all human agency from dating. because what's more romantic than being told who to love?” one commented online.
Dating apps are now offering AI-powered solutions, replacing the habit of endlessly swiping right to find “the one”
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Love has always been messy, unpredictable, and deeply human. And for years, single people have turned to apps like Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble to find their perfect match.
But now, AI-powered dating apps are claiming they can make the first move better than you can.
These AI systems study you, your messages, habits, likes, dislikes, and even your tone before matching you with someone.
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One app called Ditto, described as a “college matchmaker,” has been offering users an AI-driven system to match people based on their interests.
The startup was founded in 2024 by former UC Berkeley students and has arranged more than 12,000 dates.
92% of the matched pairs even said they wanted to go on a second date.
Ditto, described as a “college matchmaker,” has been offering students an AI-driven system to match people based on their interests
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Ditto completely trashes the Tinder-style model of swiping left and right on profiles.
Instead, students take a survey and feed their responses to the platform’s AI system, which then churns out matches every Wednesday.
The matched students can then pick a date and time that works for both of them.
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The AI system goes one step ahead by planning an itinerary for the first date as well.
“For the past 20 years, we’ve connected in primitive ways. But now … AI brings your ‘profiles’ to life as agents,” reads the Ditto website, promising to be a complete replacement for old-school dating apps.
Another app called Overtone was built by none other than Justin McLeod, who founded the popular dating app Hinge
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Similarly, another app called Overtone also does not offer users profiles or matches to sift through.
It instead uses AI to get to know the user in their own words and then makes an introduction after concluding that the two people will be a good match.
Overtone was built by none other than Justin McLeod, who founded the popular dating app Hinge.
After spending more than a decade perfecting the swipe-right-swipe-left business, McLeod ditched the algorithm and walked away from Hinge to give the world Overtone.
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“Overtone is not a dating app,” McLeod wrote in a blog post for the website.
“By that I mean it’s not a social platform with profiles that reduce people to stats, quotes and photos,” he continued. “There are no opaque, algorithmic feeds trained on split-second impulses. And there’s no juggling likes, matches and chats across many people at once.”
McLeod recently announced that the New-York based Overtone managed to raise funds to the tune of $18 million.
After spending more than a decade perfecting the swipe-right-swipe-left business, McLeod ditched Hinge to build Overtone
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On the other side of the world, an AI-powered dating app called Fate has been offering Londoners its own solution to finding love.
One user in her late 20s, Jasmine, said she had been single for three years and was starting to find apps like Tinder and Hinge “repetitive.”
After growing tired of having the same conversations over and over again, she decided to download Fate and leave fate in the hands of AI.
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“I thought, why not sign up, try something different? It sounded quite cool using, you know, agentic AI, which is where the world is going now, isn’t it?” she told The Guardian.
Fate calls itself the first “agentic AI dating app” to take swiping completely out of the equation.
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The London-based start-up asks users to give an interview, where they answer questions about their hopes and struggles. They are then shown five and only five potential matches, so users don’t have to go through a long list of possible first dates.
If a user rejects a match, they are forced to write an explanation, thus going beyond mindlessly swiping left on dozens of profiles.
But Fate doesn’t stop there. It also offers coaching to users to make AI-suggested improvements to their chats.
Some apps even offer coaching to users to improve their conversations with potential matches
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While speaking to The Guardian, Fate’s founder Rakesh Naidu demonstrated how the app’s coaching assistance works.
“I just feel a bit hopeless at the moment in regards to my chats. I feel like I’m not being engaging enough or meaningful enough,” he told the app’s AI assistant.
“I just need some kind of meaningful questions I can ask to really uncover the essence of people,” he continued.
A female voice from the app reassured him, saying, “I hear you, Rakesh. Here are a few ideas. One, what’s something you’re passionate about that not many people know?”
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“The new generation are basically not going to have the real-world experience of actually trying and failing,” one user said
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While some users find the coaching ability useful, others found it “scary.”
“I could see it being helpful, but I mean there are obviously some concerns,” said Jeremias, who has been using the app for months.
“Like the new generation are basically not going to have the real-world experience of actually trying and failing,” he added.
While many have flocked to these AI-powered matchmaking apps, others have been skeptical, saying: “This is what dating come to. What happened to the chance encounters, cheeky smiles on a train etc? Want the old days back now.”
“ChatGPT can’t even get factual information from the last ten years correct. This should be totally fine,” one said.
Another wrote, “We're building an app that removes all human agency from dating. because what's more romantic than being told who to love?”
“I guess AI knows more about my taste than me,” read one comment online
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