The founder of the dating app Bumble Whitney Wolfe Herd believes the future of dating will involve having your personal AI “dating concierge” talk to hundreds of other AIs to find a match.
That unabashed vision may sound familiar: it’s literally the plot of a 2017 episode of “Black Mirror,” as countless people on social have pointed out.
“You could, in the near future, be talking to your AI dating concierge,” Wolfe Herd, who stepped down as Bumble CEO in 2023 but remains involved in the company, told an audience at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. “You could share your insecurities. There is a world where your dating concierge could go and date for you with other dating concierges.”
Unsurprisingly, the bizarre suggestion triggered plenty of derisive laughter, leading Wolfe Herd to double down.
“No no truly,” she added. “And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It could scan all of San Francisco for you and say these are the three people you really ought to meet.”
“That’s the power of AI if harnessed the right way,” she added.
It’s a controversial and arguably nightmarish vision of what the world of online dating could soon look like in the age of generative AI — as if it wasn’t bad enough out there already.
The concept was explored almost seven years ago in an episode of Netflix’s brooding anthology series “Black Mirror” titled “Hang the DJ,” in which two individuals are set up by an algorithm called “The System” and determined to be “the perfect match.” They’re obligated to enter a life-long partnership, whether they like it or not — until their predetermined “expiry date.”
But — spoiler alert — the pair are later revealed to be AI versions of actual people dreamed up by a machine, taking part in one out of 1,000 simulations designed to figure out whether their real-life counterparts are actually compatible.
Of course, the technology portrayed in the episode is entirely hypothetical. But with the advent of AI technologies like AI chatbots, tech executives like Wolfe Herd argue we could one day be matched up by an algorithm not unlike how “The System” works.
Whether anybody actually wants to have a “dating concierge” act on their behalf to navigate the online dating landscape remains to be seen, but the concept may not be as far-fetched as it first seems.
We’ve already come across an example of (mostly) men leveraging the power of AI to gain an advantage on dating apps. Moscow resident Aleksandr Zhadan, for instance, programmed OpenAI’s GPT large language models to talk to well over 5,000 women.
Fortunately for him, he ended up finding his current wife through the scheme — but not every woman will enjoy being chatted up by an AI, whether it’s a Bumble “concierge” or otherwise. After all, having an algorithm speak on your behalf seems like a grim abdication of personal agency.
Is this really the “power of AI” being “harnessed the right way,” as Wolfe Herd suggests? Or is it yet another example of a company trying to shoehorn the tech into every aspect of our lives, capitalizing on the ever-elusive idea of the “perfect match?”
For the time being, AI chatbots are still woefully inadequate for the job. They can barely tell the truth from fiction, let alone accurately represent our needs and desires to identify the perfect partner.
In the meantime, Bumble wants to have its users send out AI-generated first messages, as part of a recently announced feature called “Opening Move,” instead of writing their own — the beginning, in many ways, of a potentially slippery slope.
More on online dating: Tinder Now Letting Rizzless Sad Sacks Pay $500/Month to Message People Without Even Matching
