On June 25th, Pro TV asked me a deceptively simple question for a piece on the new wave of dating apps: can artificial intelligence actually figure out who you're compatible with — and should it be the one starting the conversation for you?
Dating apps are entering their AI era. A growing number of platforms now test systems that suggest your replies, score how compatible two people are, build a more flattering profile for you — and, in the newest experiments, let an AI assistant carry the first conversations on your behalf before the two humans ever speak. The companies frame it as help. A lot of younger users I heard in the segment frame it as one more layer of distance: they already talk about "dating fatigue" after dozens of shallow chats that lead nowhere, and adding a bot in the middle, as one of them put it, just removes whatever was still authentic.
My honest answer on camera was that the hard part isn't a technical limitation of AI — it's that we don't have a definition to automate in the first place.
"Compatibility between two people is still a very intimate thing. It's not just that AI can't answer this question — I don't think science can. If you ask a scientist to define what makes a couple compatible, they don't have an answer either."
That's the core of it. An algorithm can optimize for what it can measure — shared interests, response patterns, an attractive profile. But "chemistry" isn't a missing dataset waiting to be collected; it's something we can't yet specify even in plain language, let alone hand to a model as an objective. When there's no clear target, a confident-sounding recommendation is just a guess dressed up as a match.
There's a second risk the segment's psychologist, Diana Miron, raised, and I think it's the more practical one: when AI helps everyone present a more polished, more "eligible" version of themselves — from the photo onward — you can end up attached to an idealized image rather than a person. That's an old problem on dating apps, but better tools make the gap between the profile and the human wider, not smaller.
None of this means AI has no place here — sorting, surfacing, breaking the ice for people who freeze on the first message are all real uses. The line worth watching is the one between a tool that helps you show up, and a tool that shows up instead of you. Roughly 360 million people use dating apps worldwide, according to Forbes, so it's a line a lot of us will end up standing on.