39% of British Singles Now Use AI in Their Dating Lives

Thirty-nine percent of British singles have used AI in their dating lives, according to a survey of 3,000 people published this month by Match Group, the owner of Tinder and Hinge. Among members of gen Z, defined in the survey as people born in the mid-1990s to early 2010s, the figure rises to 66%. For millennials, born in the early 1980s to mid-1990s, it reaches 53%.

The numbers describe a shift in behavior that has arrived with little public debate. Chatbots now draft profiles, write messages, rehearse conversations and judge whether a match is genuine. The same survey shows where users draw the line: about a third of UK singles said they would end a date if they discovered AI had written the other person's messages.

Who is using AI as a wingman?

Sam, a 27-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent, is one of them. After his ex joked that her sister found him ugly, he turned to Google Gemini, which looked at the photo and politely disagreed. AI has served as his wingman ever since, delivering pep talks and vetting his outgoing messages.

He is candid about the trade-off. Relying on AI is bad, he told the Guardian, and he would rather begin dating in person. But he sees a "paradigm shift in dating that's occurring, which is really odd, where everything is expected to start online."

The pressure of app-based dating shapes how he deploys the technology. "Online dating … as a guy it's a bit of a ghost town," he says. "Rather than saying: 'Hey, how's your weekend going?' it's thinking about what I can pick up that might get a response."

According to Match, the most common uses of AI across all age groups are:

• Getting advice about someone they are talking to
• Planning date ideas
• Practising conversations
• Writing a dating profile or messages
• Vetting whether profiles or photos are genuine

One practice remains taboo for the majority of singles, the survey found: using AI to alter a photo.

What does AI coaching look like in practice?

A single mother from New Zealand, who asked to remain anonymous, describes using ChatGPT as a dating mentor. She had little relationship experience before meeting her ex-husband. "I did not really date before I met my ex-husband … with ChatGPT I set it up to coach me to become secure – to not panic about any delay in messaging, to not rush into anything," she says.

A 51-year-old man from Melbourne, Australia, who re-entered dating after his 20-year marriage ended, used a chatbot to triage the workload of modern matchmaking. "It was getting [to be] quite a lot of work, like all the chats and the profiles. So I thought: 'How can I use AI just to sort of speed it up a little bit?'" he says.

The chatbot also reversed his snap judgments. It pushed him toward profiles he had overlooked, including the woman who became his current partner. "[With] my current partner, it was really aggressive with me saying that: 'Nah, she's your vibe, she just takes shit photos.' And then I meet her at a cafe and she's absolutely drop-dead gorgeous," he says.

When he admitted to his partner that AI had assisted his side of their exchanges, she confessed in turn: she had used Anthropic's Claude chatbot to analyze his responses. She joked that the "two Claudes were probably just chatting away behind the scenes."

That mutual admission is the exception. The survey's finding that roughly a third of UK singles would walk away from a date over AI-written messages suggests the practice is widespread but largely undisclosed.

Are chatbots replacing friends and family?

Dec, 31, from London, uses ChatGPT as a "sounding board" when chatting with single men. He uploads his dating conversations and prompts the model with questions such as "Tell me what you think the red flags there are" and "What does this connection look like?"

The approach produced a number of dates. It has also produced second thoughts. Dec says his "brain feels like it's rotting because everything's just offloaded to AI now." He adds: "We all know it's going to be a bit of a yes man sometimes."

The Match data indicates chatbots have not yet displaced human counsel. Only 7% of singles discuss how their date went with a chatbot. A group chat leads at 29%, followed by parents at 20%.

Dec sees a broader withdrawal behind those numbers. "Maybe our friends are becoming more distant because of technology, a little more hands off, compared to the generation before us [who] would get together in their flat or the pub and just absolutely dish the dirt," he says.

Will AIs date each other before people do?

The survey also probed a more radical scenario: autonomous assistants talking to each other and reporting back before the two humans ever speak. More than a quarter of respondents liked the idea, even though a majority called it "unacceptable."

Match Group has ruled the concept out. Yoel Roth, the company's head of trust and safety, says Match is taking a "hard stance" against bot-to-bot dating.

"In a world where people say that they're more alienated than ever, are hungrier for connection than ever, we don't get closer to that goal of human connection by having robots talk to each other," Roth says.

That position carries commercial weight. Match Group owns Tinder and Hinge, two of the largest dating platforms, and its policy decisions set norms for tens of millions of users. A platform that tolerated fully automated courtship would risk hollowing out the product it sells.

Sam, for his part, sees a ceiling on what the technology can do for him. "If I replace my humour with AI I think I've died as a person," he says.

With two-thirds of gen Z already using AI somewhere in their dating lives, the question for platforms like Match is no longer whether users bring chatbots into courtship, but where to enforce the boundary between assistance and automation.