Bumble, the company that differentiated itself from apps like Tinder by creating a “feminist dating app,” hasn’t done the brand much favors lately. Yes, there was an ad campaign that appeared to shame women who choose celibacy — which the company wisely pulled this week. There was also a tentative announcement that Bumble could be scrapping its defining “women make the first move” ethos.
Then there were the strange remarks last week from Bumble founder and #girlboss icon Whitney Wolfe Hurd, who informed the audience at Bloomberg’s Tech Summit about “a world where your dating concierge can go and meet another concierge for you for meetings’. Naturally, these “concierges” would use artificial intelligence software that users could train via “shar[ing] your uncertainty’ and thus help to ‘train myself in a better way of thinking about yourself,” says Wolf Herd.
That, by the way, will be the secret to getting Bumble out of its post-pandemic financial hole: “We’re going to lean fast and furious. We already have. … We will win. We will be the way people meet.”
If such blatant confidence sounds familiar, it might be because it was the exact same ad Wolf Herd made last year before he stepped down as Bumble’s CEO in November as a result of its poor financial performance. As she told Bloomberg three months before she left, you can “use a chatbot to instill confidence, to help someone feel really confident before they go and talk to a bunch of people.” In other words, consult a robot dating coach—one that hopefully doesn’t hail from Strauss’s world of toxic pickup artists.
Never mind that we already have problems with ordinary people getting too attached to the myriad chatbot characters popping up on the internet. Never mind that other startups are cashing in on personalized online dating personalities like EVA AI. Never mind that Bloomberg himself last year tested various AI dating startups and found them willing. Never mind that the Wolfe Herd’s constant calls for AI failed to boost Bumble’s stock price, even though it was a (temporarily) winning strategy for other tech companies. Folks, the future of “feminist” dating is a weird bot that will just go ahead and search other bots for you. No transparency or human feedback required, dangit.
Of course, Wolfe Herd can just look at how its competitors are doing, although, like Bumble, they aren’t in such a hot spot themselves. Match Group, which is the parent company of Tinder and OKCupid, recently found that even its own popular apps are losing market share and monetization potential. A press release written by ChatGPT from February announcing that Match was partnering with OpenAI didn’t exactly help matters. So the strategy now is to focus on its relatively younger offering, Hinge, even as Match battles a consumer lawsuit alleging that Hinge and Tinder are exploitative and “predatory” in terms of their subscription costs and user experience.
Meanwhile, Grindr, the LGBTQ+ app that cut half its staff last year, is still hoping to recover its plummeting stock value, perhaps by — wait for it — deploying a chatbot that can simply learn from users’ private messages. (Grindr might want to tread carefully there, as it’s being sued in the UK for … selling daters’ sensitive personal information, like their HIV status, to third-party advertisers.)
For tech companies and startups whose business models have been battered by high interest rates, it makes sense to make grandiose proclamations about AI that will mollify your investors. He worked for Rent the Runway, whose stock soared last month after a bullish AI profit call, and he works for all the S&P companies whose interest in AI has seen them outperform their peers on the charts. But such lofty experiments haven’t similarly supported Match and Grindr this year. While Bumble has seen some recovery this year, this turnaround in fortunes can be attributed more to day-to-day developments (eg, a refreshed logo, new ask questions features, more subscription service payments) rather than bot profiles.
This, in particular, is an area where zoomers and millennials, faced with social networks completely saturated with auto-generated images and statuses and accounts, are really, really looking for that eventual human connection. Dating apps are currently falling out of favor with this valuable demographic, not least thanks to the prevalence of scammers and the constant deluge of fake dating options. If the control and paranoia of the user base is so pronounced that even Zayn Malik can’t use Tinder for casual encounters without being accused of catfishing, why reinforce such mistrust by sending out an army of more fake profiles?
It must be said that careful use of advanced chatbots can really be beneficial in helping online dating – to brainstorm openings and funny words, to practice basic conversational principles, to break the ice, to personalize and optimize your communication. But handing the entire relationship building over to some bloodless avatar who decides to make all your choices for you isn’t going to help us with loneliness and dating anxiety. Especially if they’re avatars who might also be a known judge of character, who carry their own racial and gender biases, who will never let you know who you might have missed, and who might just hallucinate something wild to say out of nowhere .
If anything, what can help most is the realization that bots can be a means but not an end — along with the firm belief that there really is another person getting your wink emoticons.
