Can Grindr’s AI Cupid Help You Find Love?
Grindr is joining the trend of expanding dating apps with AI, according to a new one Wall Street Journal report. Described as a virtual wingman for online dating, the AI chatbot will proactively try to match potential romantic partners and even help plan their dates when it officially debuts.
The main idea behind Grindr’s development is to adapt the increasingly common AI chatbot experience, a la ChatGPT, to a space where people want to connect. The chatbot would have more freedom of choice than the typically reactive chatbot, autonomously making decisions and performing tasks on behalf of users without them even asking. In the company’s vision, the chatbot will look for potential dates for users, even send messages on their behalf, then propose to talk and offer topics for conversation between users. It will even be able to plan a date for them that they would both enjoy and make any necessary reservations.
One of Grindr’s specific focuses is the idea of a bot-to-bot conversation between AI agents acting on behalf of different people. The idea seems to be to streamline the initial compatibility testing portion of an initial conversation. Instead, the AI agents would work together to determine compatibility before the humans involved talk. That would theoretically reduce the number of dates that go nowhere and make Grindr more attractive to people burned out by bad dates.
This would of course mean sharing a lot of information about yourself with the AI. Considering Grindr’s users are primarily gay and bisexual men who may not be public about their sexuality or lives where it is stigmatized, that’s a lot of trust to give an AI engine. Grindr claims that measures to protect the identities and interactions of its users are at the top of its AI wingman’s priority list.
AI romance
While Grindr’s plans sound exotic now, there’s a real push in the dating app space to expand products with AI. For example, Tinder has a new feature that lets you choose your best profile photo, while Bumble, in addition to photo assistance, wants AI to help users design their entire profile and make the first conversation between users smooth.
To build the AI, Grindr has partnered with Ex-human, a company whose AI is built on understanding human emotions. The model is trained on data specifically relevant to Grindr’s user base, including the phrases and style of speech unique to the community using the app. The concepts are still in the early stages of testing. The small test group will grow to 1,000 people by 2025 and 10,000 next year as Grindr collects feedback. Grindr is aiming for a gradual rollout of features that will be able to do everything it envisions for its roughly 14 million users by 2027.