Modern dating is a dumpster fire.
It never feels quite right. The swiping, the messaging, the introductions, the constant hum of rejection. Then comes the maintenance required to get you a date. Cuter photos that feel a little less you and changing bios to seem more interesting. Forever tweaking your desirability and market value to get laid. And now, much like everything else lately, dating apps are converting to the latest religion of AI, integrating the all-powerful god into their services.
On a good day, AI hands us the tools to polish ourselves, inflating us with interests, knowledge, and language that are not entirely our own. We have been using it to combat the onslaught of job hunting. Now, that same practice enters the dating market.
AI is making blow-up sex dolls of us all.
Dating apps are now announcing increased investment in artificial intelligence. Hinge and Tinder are introducing AI advice for profiles, editing prompts and suggesting ways to make users more appealing. AI-driven apps like Amata and Iris promise smarter matchmaking, by curating the profiles we like and filtering out those we apparently won’t Bumble has introduced its own AI matchmaker, Dates, pitching the technology as a way to reduce the exhaustion and endless swiping that defines online dating. Yes, this may combat dating fatigue, though it begs the question: if AI is creating our profiles, finding our matches, and writing our messages, who is actually doing the dating?
Grindr recently launched its AI subscription tier, Grindr EDGE, after trialing it in Australia and publicly debuting it at the Mighty Hoopla festival in Sydney. The service introduces AI-powered features that summarise conversations, monitor chats, and analyse profiles to create insights and curate lists of potential hookups. Unlike most dating apps, Grindr operates primarily as a hookup ecosystem. Its success is measured not in relationships formed but in connections made quickly and frequently.
When algorithms optimise sex, they optimise more of it. The rhetoric is always about abundance. For queer people, this question feels even more loaded, given our proclivities for app-based hookups. Sometimes it feels like the more the apps promise, the cheaper those connections become. Did I really decide that I wanted to meet this person, or did the gAI (as Grindr have coined it) decide for me?
The other problem quietly creeping into the world of dating apps is money. We have all heard of the Rose Jail on Hinge, a problem that will only be further exacerbated by these AI tiers. Most platforms now operate on tiered subscription models. Pay a little and you gain more visibility. Pay a little more and you gain filters, better matches and greater control over who sees you. AI will almost certainly follow the same path. Better AI tools will belong to the people who can afford them. It creates a strange class system within dating itself, where those who can afford optimisation have a far better chance at finding connection.
Still, the strangest part of all this is not the technology itself. It is how it makes dating feel. AI promises dating success by creating perfect profiles and efficient matches. In the context of Grindr, the more we optimise ourselves for a hookup and the hopeful glimmer of something more, the more I start to feel inhuman. Because, yes, I want attention and I want sex, but if AI is required for someone’s touch, that’s when I am slapped with the image of an AI sex doll version of myself.
That is the sinister future dating apps are heading towards. Not a human meeting another human, just two AI-optimised online profiles dating each other. Will people use it? Yes. We are lazy and hopeless in the face of modern dating. When we do start using it, I wonder whether dating will still feel like connection at all, or just another system we have learned how to optimise.
This article was featured in the 2026 Respect Week edition of Glass Magazine.
Ben Steele is a creative producer and editor working across audio, digital, print, and live media. QUT alum, former editor at Glass Magazine and currently developing Buttertongue, an independent publication exploring erotic culture and contemporary queer life through thoughtful storytelling.
