Let AI date for you, says Bumble founder

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AI bots awkwardly flirting with each other is the future of human dating, or so Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd would like you to imagine. Speaking at Bloomberg’s tech conference this week, she floated the idea of AI dating “concierges” getting to know each other to spare people the tedium of cringing through convos with strangers they’ll never vibe with.

Aside from helping to narrow the pool of contenders, Wolfe Herd envisions users’ AI chatbots doling out dating advice based on people’s insecurities. The Bloomberg crowd chuckled at her dead-serious comments, which came as Bumble tries to convince singles that its matchmaking services are still worth paying for.

Make algorithms attractive again

Bumble is already adopting features intended to make swiping for love feel less like a full-time job:

• The “Opening Move” function will soon let users preselect DMs to initiate conversations instead of racking their brains for quirky opening lines.

• The app is also updating the options it gives users to describe the type of relationship they want to include more specific options (among them “life partner” and “ethical non-monogamy”) and letting users display those preferences on their profiles.

The revamp arrives as dating apps’ paid user growth slows. Only 21% of Americans think that algorithms can predict who they’ll fall for, per a 2023 Pew survey.

Gen Z is swiping left on apps…a recent Axios/Generation Labs survey revealed that nearly 4 in 5 college and grad students don’t use them.