ChatGPT will hook you up...for Sat night?

Just kidding. I'd never trust ChatGPT. Facebook knows you, loves you, understands you. Don't let your sister fix you up...that never works out.

Quartz Media

Feb 17, 2026

“Will you write my dating app bio?” used to be a favor you asked a friend. Now, it’s a platform feature. Facebook Dating will draft a version, Bumble will generate one, too, and Tinder will happily nudge the whole dating app experience toward something smoother, safer, and more swipeable.

AI is being sold as a fix for the two bottlenecks dating apps helped create: the fatigue of infinite choice and the anxiety of the first message.

The dating game’s big players are pushing AI to the front of the experience, stapling automation onto the swipe-and-chat machine: better matching algorithm claims, better photos, better prompts, better openers.

But “Assistance” is popular only until it starts to feel like impersonation.

A January 2026 Coffee Meets Bagel report said about 80% of users ages 21–35 were comfortable with some form of AI help; the report warned bot-assisted flirting can create expectation mismatches when people meet in person.

Generative tools risk making dating profiles more legible and less informative at the same time. If everyone can sound interesting, then being interesting stops signaling anything. And the weird specifics that hint at compatibility get sanded down into the same beige, mildly flirty middle.

Newcomers are responding by rewriting the rules, not the opening lines. Amata sells “no swipe, no DM” matchmaking and skips the euphemisms, using AI matchmaking to get its users meeting out in the real world. Iris runs users’ images through a predictive algorithm, quantifying attraction as something that’s machine learnable.

As apps feel more transactional and more automatable, in-person events and matchmaking start to look like the scarce good.

Eventbrite saw “friending” events rise 35% year over year in 2025, with attendance at board-game dating events up 55% — a small stampede toward rooms where nobody can outsource the first impression.

When platforms optimize “dating” as a product, they’re also shaping what “being a person” looks like in the interface.

The closer AI gets to replacing the human texture — the awkwardness, the specificity, the risk — the more dating starts to resemble a system that sells you back your own hope. Quartz’s Shannon Carroll has more on the copy-paste courtship era.