Choosing the best photos for your dating profile can be tricky, so Tinder has created a virtual curator to help you out. The AI-powered Photo Selector analyzes your shortlist of potential photos straight from your phone and suggests the ones its model predicts will show you at your best.
To use the feature, a Tinder user takes a selfie so the AI knows what they look like, and then has the app look at photos on their phone. The AI model chooses images for the user to view and decides whether to add them to their profile. Photo Selector is rolling out to Tinder users in the US for the first time this month, with an international rollout later this summer.
Tinder hopes the AI tool will smooth the way for setting up a dating profile. According to its own Online Opinion survey of young singles, 52% struggle to choose a profile photo for dating apps, and singles under 25 spend an average of 33 minutes choosing a photo for their dating app profile. It’s no surprise, then, that 68% of them welcome the idea of AI assistance in choosing their photos.
While Tinder doesn’t say so explicitly, the research does suggest that heterosexual men in particular need help. Heterosexual single women find profiles with at least four images that highlight a man’s personality more attractive, and having more than one facial photo increases a man’s chance of a match by 71 percent.
“We’re proud to be the first dating app to roll out an AI tool that can dramatically simplify the profile creation experience — an area we know is one of the hardest parts of dating,” Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno said in a statement. rack“As a market leader, we push ourselves to define the industry’s best use cases for meaningful AI integrations for consumers,”
Discrete AI
Tinder hasn’t made much of a privacy concern surrounding the new feature, though the access and use of personal photos by AI models may make some nervous. Users could inadvertently expose sensitive or private images by granting the app access to their camera rolls. The company has privacy policies and security measures in place, but when it comes to something as intimate as photos for dating apps, it’s easy to imagine that some might hesitate without sufficient transparency and trust over how images are used, stored, and protected.
That’s on top of the facial recognition element. While necessary to successfully curate the photos, the biometric data involved is arguably even more sensitive. Tinder may have to go the extra mile to assure users that their data is anonymized when the AI processes it, and that it’s not shared with third parties. Still, as AI assistants and related tools become more ubiquitous, they’ll likely become commonplace, helping to surface people’s online profiles, whether on dating apps or elsewhere.
“As our Photo Selector feature shows, we develop AI technology to help you make decisions, not make them for you,” Iosotaluno said.