When AI Becomes Your Dating Coach

Left, left, left, left, left, right, left, left, left, left, left. It's become muscle memory—the kind I can execute while doom-scrolling an Arsenal match or balancing precariously on the metro. Dating apps promise infinite possibilities; my thumb experiences them as an infinite queue.

57 messages. That's how many people typically exchange on traditional dating apps before meeting in person, according to Amata CEO Ludovic Huraux. Most conversations die somewhere in between. Now AI promises to fix this broken funnel. But can algorithms actually help us find love?

The Exhaustion Economy

A 2025 study in Media Psychology found that evaluating lots of profiles degrades decision-making—the "more swipes, worse choices" hypothesis in lab-coat form. The queue doesn't just exhaust you emotionally; it actively degrades your judgment as you keep shopping for your soulmate.

Into that exhaustion walks AI, offering to handle the hardest parts. Tinder is stuffing the swipe era into an AI exoskeleton with Chemistry for better matches, Photo Selector using on-device biometrics, and Game Game—an OpenAI-powered tool where you can practice flirting like it's a foreign language you forgot in middle school.

Bumble ships generative bios and replies, while Match Group says Hinge's AI Core Discovery Algorithm lifted matches and contact exchanges 15% since March. Grindr is building an AI-heavy premium tier that costs up to $499.99 in some early pilots.

The Smoothing Machine

When Facebook Dating offered to AI-write my bio, I said yes out of curiosity. The results were corporate poetry: "East Coast journalist by day, West Coast roots forever." Safe, comprehensible, and utterly generic.

My two-year-old dating app bio reads: "Will brake for wildflowers. Always covered in dog hair. I like my plants more than I like most people." It's imperfect. It's also mine.

AI assists promise to make you sound fine. They can also sand you down into a safe, comprehensible résumé of a person. When Hinge's AI told me to go deeper on my "I'll fall for you if my dog likes you" response, it didn't know my dog had died. The models don't know anything unless you tell them. They're eager to help anyway.

The Expectation Mismatch

A January 2026 report from Coffee Meets Bagel warned that bot-assisted flirting creates expectation mismatches when people meet in person. About 80% of surveyed users (ages 21–35) said they were comfortable with AI assistance in dating. Comfortable with assistance—not necessarily thrilled by substitution.

Generative everything—bios, prompts, openers—risks pushing profiles toward a smooth, samey median. Profile refiners can make dating apps worse by sanding off the idiosyncrasies that signal real compatibility. What happens when two people send each other AI-generated messages? Do the chatbots fall in love?

Disrupting the Funnel

While legacy players add AI to keep the funnel moving, newcomers are creating different funnels entirely. Amata positions itself as "no swipe, no DM" matchmaking: Users chat with an AI matchmaker, pay $16 to initiate a date, get a short chat window two hours before meeting, and face pauses after repeat cancellations.

The company sets up more than 2,000 dates monthly in New York City. "These dating apps aren't designed to meet in real life," Huraux tells me, "but to keep you addicted." His solution removes profiles, swipes, and extended chatting—dividing app time "by 10" to get to actual dates.

The Venture Capital of Love

Investors are betting big on AI-powered romance. Dating app funding reached $200 million in 2025, with AI features driving much of the interest. Match Group's stock jumped 12% after announcing expanded AI integration across its portfolio.

But venture capital and vulnerability make strange bedfellows. When love becomes a conversion funnel optimized by algorithms, what gets lost in translation? The awkward pauses, the terrible pickup lines, the genuine moments of connection that can't be A/B tested?