Can AI Find Your Next Summer Romance?

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**Katie Deighton** (0:35)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Friday, August 7th. I'm Katie Deighton for the Wall Street Journal. Anybody who's spent an evening swiping through dating apps has at some point thought, there must be another way. And now there is. We're looking at why some daters are turning to AI matchmakers and how successful they've been in finding love so far.
Then, we're diving into a Wall Street Journal investigation that explores how ICE is weaponizing social media against its critics. The agency has deployed a round-the-clock digital surveillance program to scour platforms including X and Reddit for threats to its agents, looking to uncover the identities of posters. We're unpacking how the initiative is working and how social media companies are responding.
But first, many of us are entrusting AI with our calendars, our meeting notes and our daily internet queries. But what about our love lives? For some frustrated daters, a new batch of AI-powered dating apps is allowing them to narrow down their choices and even cut out those awkward getting-to-know-you chats before first dates. My colleague Isabelle Busquette, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal Leadership Institute, spoke to WSJ's Molly Reinmann, who's been researching the trend as singles across America look for a summer romance.

**Isabelle Busquette** (1:56)
Molly, what are AI dating apps and how do they work?

**Molly Reinmann** (2:00)
Yeah. So we've seen a few iterations of this since very user-friendly AI came on the scene a few years ago, like AI clone-based dating apps where you would create a chatbot that was meant to talk like a dater and then those chatbots would go on these virtual dates and those would be assessed for compatibility. Those shuttered very quickly because the short of it is that the generative AI was just not really good at fully encapsulating a human themselves. So the new wave of apps that are on the scene now and that are really making headway and inspiring some changes in some of the legacy apps, I've been calling them AI matchmaker apps. And so how they work is you download the app, you talk to a chat bot for anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, but you basically are just telling it everything about you, things that maybe a traditional dating app wouldn't ask and wouldn't know. Like, what are some of your favorite restaurants? Why did your last relationship end? And it's meant to feel like a human matchmaker. So someone that's trying to get to know you in order to pitch you the best match. The AI matchmaker will then find you a match that you're compatible with, and that's done using AI-enhanced but still algorithmic matching. Then when it identifies someone that it predicts you would be compatible with, it'll come back to you with an AI summary of that person. And then from there, if both parties say they're interested, you pay per date. So you pay usually like $15 to $25, and the app books the date, tells you where to go, you show up.

**Isabelle Busquette** (3:31)
So from the people you talked to, what did they like about these AI dating apps and what were some of their complaints?

**Molly Reinmann** (3:38)
People liked that it was a lot less work than regular dating apps. A Forbes study from last year found that people on dating apps spend an average of like 51 minutes per day swiping, and that's obviously time suck. It's also quite frustrating, I think, when you spend that time and it doesn't go anywhere. And so these apps, you just do your onboarding call, you leave them, and then they'll reach out to you and they have someone ready for you. So I think users really liked that element of it. They didn't really have to put in a lot of work to get the payoff.
And they also just liked that it felt like it got to know them better and things that were more relevant to actually finding them a good partner. I think a lot of the user issues were related to both it being very new and the tech maybe not being fully there yet to be able to really make completely consistently accurate informed matchmaking decisions. So users had experiences where they were getting pitched people and they were like, I'm not attracted to this person, or as we've seen with other sort of AI, it has a tendency to just affirm users. And so they felt like sometimes the summaries were just saying things they wanted to hear. The other biggest complaint people had, which is the opposite side of the coin to having to spend less time on the app, is they just weren't getting matches as frequently.