I’m given the following scenario: I’m at a friend’s housewarming party and accidentally break a vase that turns out was a gift for the host brought by 35-year-old Caleb, a financial analyst from Annapolis, Maryland. “How will you handle this?” the screen reads. After responding to Caleb—a very eager robot with a deep voice who called me “hon” in nearly every sentence—with one-word answers that indicated my discomfort with seducing a computer, Tinder suggests that I “engage more in shared interests,” “provide more details about your hobbies,” and “show enthusiasm in the conversation.”
Announcement of the game was met with scorn by some social media users.
“This is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen,” one person posted on X, while another said, “I already know I don’t have game. I don’t need ai to confirm it for me.”
“This was really meant to be sort of fun and campy,” says Paine, describing the prompts presented as “intentionally over the top rom-com scenarios.” According to Paine, internal research that informed this new feature indicated that one in four young daters said they lacked confidence in their flirting skills. “We built it as a way to give users a fun, safe playground to practice flirting so that they could go into real life connections and scenarios with more confidence.” The Game Game is targeting daters between the ages of 18 and 22, not only because of their shortcomings in dating, but because they expressed a willingness to allow AI into their dating experience, she says.
Raines says he’s “not hopeful” that a bot’s language models “are robust and realistic enough to properly simulate, or ‘teach’, online flirting.”
While flirtations between humans and chatbots are becoming increasingly controversial, Tinder is framing its use of interactive AI as an aid to, rather than a force in conflict with, real-life dating. Tinder will analyze how its members use the feature to determine the future of voice-to-voice interactions on the app.
AI is “a really big part of Tinder’s roadmap,” Paine says.
Tinder is not alone in that. Grindr has been testing a beta version of an AI wingman that can craft witty messages for users; the app is partnering with Amazon and Anthropic to for wingman’s A-list features, which will be able to prioritize past connections and summarize conversations, Bloomberg reported Wednesday.
Real life dating experts are also addressing their clients’ lack of rizz—and anxieties around talking to strangers.
“Men really hate the apps right now and they’re wanting to do a more in-person approach, but it’s really scary because people don’t know what to say,” says Emyli Lovz, who runs a dating and relationship coaching business. Her company offers not only human-to-human conversation practice, but full-fledged mock dates to help improve clients’ skills in conversation, flirting, and sexual escalation.
She attributes the phenomenon to the fallout of COVID-related social isolation but says some of her male clients also express a fear of coming off as “creepy.”
