Connection Pending

Hinge CEO Jackie Jantos says Al is replacing the small, uncomfortable conversations that build intimacy—and that people's fear of being wrong or getting hurt is what's keeping them apart

- BY JENNIFER H. CUNNINGHAM AND KATHERINE FUNG

IN A FOCUS GROUP IN LONDON LAST YEAR, Jackie Jantos heard something that stopped her cold. Young people were describing their relationship with ChatGPT—"my chatty," they called it—and several said the same thing: They used AI for conversations they didn't want to burden their friends with.

Jantos, the CEO of Hinge, the dating app whose entire marketing model is premised on getting people off their phones and onto dates, recognized the instinct immediately. It sounded considerate. It was anything but.

"We're supplementing the gift we might offer someone else of asking for their help with a piece of technology because we feel like it's a burden," she says in an exclusive interview with Newsweek editor-in-chief Jennifer H. Cunningham. "But the burden is the gift. That's how intimacy is built."

The loneliness crisis has produced a crowded field of diagnoses: social media, the pandemic, declining marriage rates, Gen Z's aversion to in-person interaction. Jantos, who runs a company that processes more data on human romantic behavior than almost any other institution on Earth, has a more precise and more unsettling account.

The problem isn't just that people are spending less time together—though they are, measurably and dramatically. It's that AI has arrived to absorb exactly the small, vulnerable, friction-laden moments that used to force human beings toward each other. In doing so, it is quietly dismantling the psychological infrastructure that love requires.

Bad Habits

The scale of disconnection Jantos is navigating is staggering. She cites Surgeon General data showing Gen Z spends 1,000 fewer hours per year in the physical company of other people than the generation before them—that's nearly six weeks straight of time, or more than two hours of daily human contact, simply gone. When they feel bored, isolated or uncomfortable, the first instinct is to reach for a screen.