Can Grindr’s AI Cupid Help You Find Love?

Grindr joins the growing trend of AI dating apps The Wall Street Journal report. Described as a virtual host for online dating, AI chat bot will try to hook up potential romantic partners ahead of time and even help plan their dates when he officially debuts.

The main idea behind the development of Grindr is to take the increasingly common AI chatbot experience, a la ChatGPTand adapt it to the space where people want to communicate. A chatbot will have more capabilities than a typically reactive chatbot, making decisions on its own and performing tasks on behalf of users without even asking them. According to the company’s vision, the chatbot will search for potential dates for users, even sending messages on their behalf, and then invite them to chat and suggest topics for conversation between users. He will even be able to set them up on a date that they both like and reserve a room.

One feature of Grindr is the idea of bot-to-bot conversations between AI agents acting on behalf of different people. The idea seems to be to simplify the initial part of compatibility testing during the first conversation. Instead, AI agents will interact to determine compatibility before the humans involved speak. In theory, this would reduce the number of dates that go nowhere, and could make Grindr more attractive to people who have burned out on bad dates.

Of course, this would involve sharing a lot of information about yourself with the AI. Considering Grindr’s users are mostly gay and bisexual people who may not be public about their sexuality or live in places where it’s stigmatized, that’s a lot of confidence in the AI engine. Grindr says measures to protect user identities and interactions are high on the list of priorities for its AI lead.

AI romance

While Grindr’s plans sound exotic right now, there’s a real push in dating apps to expand their products with AI. For example, Tinder has a new feature to help you choose yours best profile pictureuntil Bumblein addition to photo assistance, wants artificial intelligence to help users design their entire profile and smooth the initial conversation between users.

To create the AI, Grindr partnered with Ex-human, a company whose AI is built around understanding human emotions. The model is trained on data specific to Grindr’s user base, including phrases and language styles unique to the community that uses the app. The concepts are still in the early stages of testing. The small test group will expand to 1,000 people by 2025 and 10,000 by next year as Grindr collects feedback. Grindr aims to gradually roll out the feature, which can do everything it envisions, to an estimated 14 million users by 2027.