The CEO of dating app Hinge recently suggested that generation Z, “struggling to have the confidence to put themselves out there”, needs AI to help them find love. Apparently, without AI tools, younger people will struggle to express who they really are.
From the fascinating rise and uncertain social impact of AI relationship apps, to the hype of dating app companies promising a revolution in online dating, wherever intimacy can be mediated by AI, there is a company encouraging people to make us of it.
Third-party AI apps are being used to make our chats funnier, or our profiles sexier. People are using purpose-built AI tools to train them to be better at talking to people, or simply using existing chatbots like ChatGPT to navigate conflict in their relationships or run their social lives.
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Making sense of how AI is shaping intimate life is part of my work as a love and relationship researcher. What started as a theoretical exercise, exploring the moral significance of possible use for AI, quickly entered the classroom.
A business student once told me how he used an AI model to help resolve an argument with his girlfriend. “It was like a friend,” he said, “and helped me understand her perspective better”. AI helped him express his own feelings with more clarity, and practice a hard conversation. Who wouldn’t be tempted to use these tools, to have support when trying to date, make friends, navigate family tension or work on one’s mental health?
There are obvious reasons to urge caution on these temptations, at least until we have a better understanding of their long-term effects. Experts are concerned about the accuracy of AI when issuing advice, and the fact that these tools and models are trained on data that reflects a host of biases about human beings, how they interact, and about what good intimacy looks like. There are also longstanding privacy concerns about the risks of sharing our most intimate lives with technology companies.
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AI and intimacy
There are less obvious, but even more important reasons for caution. These have to do with the nature of intimacy itself.
The normalisation of AI to mediate and shape intimacy arguably erodes self-curiosity. Attempts to frontload intimate life, shape and hone interactions, and stave off disagreement or emotional friction risk replacing the desire to find out what we think, feel and want in the moment.
The seduction of control crowds out the benefits and pleasure of curiosity. Empirical research suggests curious people are apparently less hostile, more open to the unknown, and more willing to let others speak, and that curiosity helps us avoid the excesses of power imbalances – all important factors in intimacy.
Ease of access to AI tools to mediate intimacy makes it easier to be gripped by a simplistic understanding of intimate life itself. Dating, for example, risks being seen as something to succeed at, conversation something to excel at, arguments as things to be won. Intimacy is much more than a game in which conversational inputs are exchanged until mutual satisfaction is reached. Intimacy is messy, dynamic, embodied and unpredictable. Real intimacy is improv, not scripted narrative.
Some might argue that AI tools help us acquire the skills we need for this messy improv. But, in my view, this seems false. Just as AI has been shown to deskill workplaces, or make people less able to reason critically about problems, so we should worry it will cause intimate deskilling: the erosion of the abilities needed to imagine, pursue and sustain the intimacy we desire.
These skills – what I call “romantic agency” – are built and maintained in action. No amount of advice or honing of flirtatious lines can replace the benefits to our agency of being able to experience ourselves, in action, having hard conversations, taking risks, making moves and expressing our feelings.
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There are aesthetic considerations here too. Do we really want intimate life to take on the homogenous, bland, culturally nuance-less tone favoured by generative AI? Things are better and richer when we embrace what liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill called “experiments in living”. Exploration, inconsistency, playfulness and pleasure in expression should be celebrated. Humanness and care are visible as much in how we communicate as in what we communicate.
The promise of companies seeking to mediate our intimate lives with their AI tools is that they can make us more efficient and successful in the “dating market”. But we should resist this framing. Influential street photographer Daniel Arnold was once asked why he still preferred to shoot on film, rather than use easier and more immediate digital cameras. His answer: “Digital photography is a conversation with success, and film photography is with failure.” Shooting film means he can’t “be precious, be calculating” but must live in the moment, act and see how things unfold.
We should embrace analogue intimacy, without AI mediation, for the same reason. In letting go, and giving up the ability to practice, tweak and revise before we approach someone, the true adventure of intimacy can begin.
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