Decline of dating apps: will AI be our knight in shining armour?

As lonely hearts have begun to call time on dating apps, artificial intelligence has arrived to try to woo them back.

From virtual 'wingmen' to 'baldness predictors' and tools that choose your profile photo for you, AI is being used as a 21st-century matchmaker, but will it halt the exodus or make the experience even less enjoyable?

Natural bedfellows

"More and more users seem to have fallen out of love with dating apps," said NSS Magazine, with Ofcom finding an almost 16% decrease in the usage of the 10 most popular dating apps between 2023 and 2024.

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A new study of 1,500 singles found that 76% now prefer early face-to-face meetings rather than protracted online chats, with many "harking back" to traditional dating methods, said London's The Standard.

So some app developers are calling in the bots to try to turn around their fortunes. AI and dating have become "natural bedfellows" and "they're tucked in, comfortable, and leaving crumbs in the sheets".

Baldness predictor

AI has been part of online dating "for longer than you've probably even realised"; for instance, on Hinge, an AI-informed selection has offered users the most "relevant" profiles.

But AI has now got its feet under the table. Bumble has new features that weed out spam and fake accounts and find and blur lewd images, which it says blocked more than 2.2 million spam, scam and inauthentic profiles in 2024. Tinder and Hinge have similar features to detect harmful or illegal behaviour on their respective apps.

The Rizz app offers to help users by suggesting responses to conversations on existing dating platforms, and a recommendation platform called Pookie Tools includes functions like a "baldness predictor".

But Tinder's Photo Selector tool, which requires partial or full access to a user's camera library to pick out the "best" photos, has proven controversial, and the Wingman tool on the gay dating app Grindr is already "entirely redundant", said The Standard.

In another divisive development, AI will conduct a voice interview with Tinder users to understand what they are looking for and suggest which messages to send to matches based on shared interests.

More burdensome

But "one might wonder" whether users will want AI to "interrogate them" and whether this "will actually lighten the experience" or simply "make it more burdensome", said NSS Magazine.

Anastasiia Babash, a member of Ethical Dating Online, said "there's a risk that users relying on AI for their love life" may "lose the ability to hold real and spontaneous conversations", making it harder to "build authentic connections".

AI's march into dating apps poses a particular risk for "vulnerable young people", said Luke Brunning in New Scientist. "Widespread use of AI to write dating bios and prompt conversations" could make manipulation "easier than ever", as well as "worsening existing social biases, and leading to harmful expectations about body image".