Reported by The Verge AI
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When Irene moved to San Francisco last year, she started using dating apps as a way to meet new people, get to know her new city, and connect with others who care about the things she does. After the 25-year-old analyst downloaded Hinge and started swiping, she noticed a trend.
“Hinge has a prompt where you can say, ‘We’ll get along if”,” she recalls. “Sometimes people will be like, ‘Fuck AI.’”
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Usually, the people who include this kind of value statement on their profile work in the arts, nursing, maybe graphic design. Within the span of a few minutes of sitting down and swiping, Irene shows me a second profile where this happened once more: “You should *not* go out with me if… you use AI.”
In San Francisco, the epicenter of tech, the metaphorical AI bomb went off in 2022 with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Conversations surrounding artificial intelligence now permeate the dating scene in one shape or another. Over the past month, I bopped around the city —, chatting with people at parties and coworking spaces and reviewing dating directories and other online profiles —, trying to find out how AI affects the dating scene.
Responses varied wildly. For some, AI feelings take on a similar valence to traditionally political ones, showing up in dating profiles next to party affiliation or other signifiers, like the watermelon emoji symbolizing solidarity with Palestinians amid the war in Gaza. Others are wrestling with the ethics of dating someone who builds AI, considering the financial benefits a partner in the industry can bring, weighing whether to have children in a future this uncertain, or even handing their love lives over to it entirely.
On a street near Berkeley, I meet up with Kyle. (His name has been changed so that he can talk openly about his personal life.) Kyle is a researcher at an AI safety nonprofit initiative, and although he is just in his early 20s, he’s already thinking about death. In the AI…