LOVE AND OTHER ROBOTS

As artificial intelligence seeps into so many different aspects of our lives, love is the natural next frontier. Could chatbots help us date better, argue better – and maybe even love better?

- Words DIVYA VENKATARAMAN

Ask anyone, and they'll tell you: The modern dating scene is a minefield. An omnishambles of dead-eyed swiping, weirdly distant but blisteringly painful rejection, and drinking until the person in front of you looks a little more like their profile picture. But could AI be our unlikely saving grace?

Match Group, which owns most of the popular mainstream dating apps in the market right now – Tinder, Hinge, PlentyofFish, Match.com – announced in December that it would introduce an AI-powered digital assistant, which would help users tailor their profiles and find dates. It heralded the new age of AI, which would allow its users to find love, sex and intimacy – whatever they came to the apps for – with more ease and more fun.

“This technology is revolutionary for dating, and we're bringing it to life across our entire portfolio,” the chief executive of Match Group, Bernard Kim, told investors. “I envision AI to be felt through the entire experience, influencing everything from profile creation to matching and connecting for dates, literally everything.”

The ‘AI assistant’ would be at one’s beck and call, helping users pick the best photos for their profile, recommending certain prompts and specifying the kind of information they should include in their user bios. (Hinge has already rolled out the prompt arm of the tool, which gently nudges users into providing more detail to certain questions, and congratulates them on a job well done when it feels that they've made a satisfactory effort. Eerie.) Not only that: An AI-powered tool will also help users pick their perfect match, through a “spoken interview” with the user to determine what they want from an app, and will suggest the kinds of messages to send to people based on their profiles and aligned interests.