A.I. Accelerates in Paris + Can A.I. Fix Your Love Life?

It’s a Valentine's Day Special!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Casey Newton?

  Well, big Valentine's Day show today, Kevin.

• 0:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 0:03Casey Newton?

  Happy Valentine's Day.

• 0:04Kevin Roose?

  Happy Valentine's Day.

• 0:04Casey Newton?

  Are you a Valentine's Day person?

• 0:07Kevin Roose?

  So my wife and I do celebrate Valentine's Day, but we celebrate it a day early because if you go out to the restaurants on Valentine's Day, it's a disaster. It's too crowded. They give you these little crappy prefix menus. It's not a good scene.

• 0:21Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 0:21Kevin Roose?

  So we are going out on Thursday.

• 0:24Casey Newton?

  That makes a lot of sense. And you've done this for years now.

• 0:27Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 0:27Casey Newton?

  And do you tell the servers that you're sort of sneaking in a little early for Valentine's?

• 0:33Kevin Roose?

  No, but I don't think we're the only people who have figured this out because the restaurants have become crowded the day before Valentine's Day, too. There must have been a memo. What about you? Are you celebrating Valentine's Day?

• 0:42Casey Newton?

  So here's the thing. On paper, you would think that I would not be that into Valentine's. Oh, another commercial holiday designed to get me to, you know, buy a card at Walgreens, whatever. Who needs that? I'm throwing myself into Valentine's Day with a fervor that is frankly shocking even to myself.

• 0:58Kevin Roose?

  Tell me about it.

• 0:59Casey Newton?

  I bought decorations for my house for Valentine's Day. Some of them are battery operated. That's how into this I'm getting. I think it's going to be so much fun.

• 1:09Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 1:10Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:11Kevin Roose?

  You are such a wife guy now.

• 1:13Casey Newton?

  I've become an absolute trad wife for my boyfriend.

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  You are. You have gone from being very cynical about romance to being the most romantic person I know.

• 1:22Casey Newton?

  Do you know the Kelly Clarkson song Miss Independent? Because it's about exactly this. It's about a sort of independent young woman who, you know, thinks she can make it in the world on her own, and then oops, she falls in love, and then everything changes. So I'm looking forward to a great Valentine's Day.

• 1:35Kevin Roose?

  Well, I'm excited for you.

• 1:36Casey Newton?

  Thank you. Me, too.

• 1:42Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Hoo, the tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 1:44Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:46Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 1:47Casey Newton?

  This week, Kevin reports back from the Paris AI Action Summit, where there was a conspicuous lack of action. Then, this Valentine's Day, we're using AI to spiff up one of our producers' dating profiles. And finally, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod joins us to discuss what AI can do to help us find true love.

• 2:05Kevin Roose?

  You know, I'd settle for a decent co-host.

• 2:07Casey Newton?

  Hey now.

• 2:07Kevin Roose?

  I'm sitting right here.

• 2:18Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, like the Statue of Liberty you've just returned to us from France.

• 2:23Kevin Roose?

  Yes, or we.

• 2:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you're you're fully bilingual now that you've spent three days in Paris. What were you doing over there?

• 2:32Kevin Roose?

  Well, I was attending the big AI Action Summit. It was held in Paris this week, and it was a giant confab of industry leaders, government leaders, people from academia and NGOs, just basically a whole bunch of very important AI figures were there. Dario Amade from Anthropic, Demis Hassabis from Google DeepMind, Sam Altman from OpenAI, the sort of heads of the three biggest AI labs in America were there, as were a bunch of people from big AI companies all over the world.

• 3:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah, now, this was the third in a series of summits like this that we've seen over the past couple of years, is that right?

• 3:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so the first two of these summits that were held in the UK and in South Korea were more explicitly focused on AI safety. In fact, the first one in the UK at Bletchley Park was called the AI Safety Summit. But this one was very much not about that, or at least not in the official portion of the summit program. It was called the AI Action Summit, and a lot of the program was about the opportunities that AI would create, not the risks it could pose.

• 3:41Casey Newton?

  And is that because at the first two summits, they were able to solve the problem of AI safety once and for all?

• 3:46Kevin Roose?

  No, I mean, there's a lot to talk about. I think this was a very big summit in terms of what it means for the future of AI. But before we talk about it, because we're talking about AI, let's roll our disclosures.

• 3:59Casey Newton?

  That's right, I'll start, Kevin. My boyfriend works at Anthropic.

• 4:02Kevin Roose?

  And I work for the New York Times, which is currently suing OpenAI and Microsoft over alleged copyright violations related to the training of large language models.

• 4:08Casey Newton?

  So what was the vibe at this conference? What were some of the big sort of headline takeaways that the people who organized it wanted us to have?

• 4:16Kevin Roose?

  Well, so maybe let's set the scene a little bit first. So you get to Paris, and you have some choices. You can either go to the main summit, which is held in the Grand Palais, which is this, you know, giant exposition hall, you know, in the center of Paris. Or you can go to these side events that are happening sort of a couple of days before and a couple of days after the main event.

• 4:39Casey Newton?

  Is that at the Petit Chateau?

• 4:42Kevin Roose?

  These are sort of, you know, events that are being held all over Paris. Many of them have more specific, like there was one about AI security, or it was one about AI safety. So these sort of events that are sprinkled throughout Paris but are not themselves the main summit. And so I did a little bit of both. I went to some of the side events. I went to the the main event on the first day of the summit at the Palais. And, you know, in the the actual summit in the Palais, you'd walk around in the kind of main floor and you'd see these exhibits. And it's things like how to use AI to preserve

• 5:21Kevin Roose?

  languages that are, you know, maybe going to to die out, or how to use AI to improve government benefits and welfare, or how to use AI to-

• 5:31Casey Newton?

  Wait, Doge was there?

• 5:34Kevin Roose?

  Doge was not there, but these were other, more European approaches to the same idea. Or how to use AI for things like climate change and disaster relief. So sort of how all the ways that AI could help people, that was what they wanted to spotlight.

• 5:49Casey Newton?

  Got it. And my understanding is also that President Macron of France also really used this opportunity to cheerlead for homegrown French companies and to sort of separate himself from the rest of Europe, which I think he cast as maybe a little bit overly enthusiastic about regulation.

• 6:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so President Macron definitely wanted to talk up France's entry into the AI race, the fact that they were not just going to let America and China dictate the future of this technology. He announced a huge new round of investments in the French AI ecosystem. He also was promoting Mistral, which is sort of France's leading AI company. And he was very much interested in sending the message that unlike the rest of the European countries which want to regulate AI, he wants to kind of accelerate and move France into the category of AI leadership.

• 6:41Casey Newton?

  And this was a message that was very much echoed by Vice President JD Vance, right, who gave one of his first major speeches since taking office. And Kevin, what did JD Vance have to say?

• 6:52Kevin Roose?

  So JD Vance showed up on the second day of the summit and gave a big speech in which he basically outlined an America first AI agenda, where he said, you know, we are not going to spend our time in America worrying about the risks of AI or trying to keep people safe from it. Instead, we are going to accelerate. We are going to remove all of the guardrails and restrictions because we want to get to advanced AI fast.

• 7:18Casey Newton?

  Did you bring a clip?

• 7:20Kevin Roose?

  Yes, let's play a clip from his talk.

• 7:22Speaker 02

  I'm not here this morning to talk about AI safety, which was the title of the conference a couple of years ago. I'm here to talk about AI opportunity. When conferences like this convene to discuss a cutting edge technology, oftentimes I think our response is to be too self-conscious, too risk averse. But never have I encountered a breakthrough in tech that so clearly calls us to do precisely the opposite. The AI future is not going to be won by hand wringing about safety. It will be won by building.

• 7:58Kevin Roose?

  So that was the message from JD Vance was that worrying about AI safety is out and worrying about AI opportunity is in.

• 8:07Casey Newton?

  Now, how was this message received by other people in Les Grand Palais?

• 8:13Kevin Roose?

  So there were a lot of people there who were happy to hear this. Some of the startup founders and other people who want to accelerate AI and who think that the doomers have been, you know, spreading these exaggerated fears that they don't agree with. But there were also a lot of safety minded people in attendance at this summit who saw this as a huge mistake, a missed opportunity. And actually, some of the AI leaders themselves disagreed with the kind of vision that JD Vance laid out. Dario Amade, the CEO of Anthropic, wrote a statement in response to the summit, just saying like, We have to look at the risks. You all don't understand like how quickly

• 8:55Kevin Roose?

  advanced AI is coming and the risks that it could pose. And so we can't actually just ignore all of that.

• 9:01Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Well, Kevin, I have to ask what we think happened between the first two of these summits where people seemed quite focused on the fact that powerful AI will, for example, be able to help people create novel biological, chemical, nuclear weapons, launch cyber attacks, spread hate speech, propaganda, misinformation, you name it, to the Paris summit where we said, you know what, do we have to keep talking about that all the time?

• 9:27Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, I think a few things happened. The most obvious is the election of Donald Trump. Kamala Harris attended a previous AI safety summit and expressed some sympathy for the views of the people who are worried about things like existential risk from AI. The Biden White House obviously put together its executive order on AI. But Donald Trump is being influenced by a different set of people. He has among his inner circle, people like Marc Andreessen, who is kind of an AI accelerationist. Others in his orbit also believe that the safety crowd is just a bunch of irrational doomers who are spreading these

• 10:07Kevin Roose?

  hyped up fears about this technology. And so I think the biggest factor is just that Donald Trump was elected and now his people are setting America's AI policy and not the Biden people.

• 10:18Casey Newton?

  Here's what I don't understand about this. Like, I think J D Vance believes that United States is currently winning in the, if you want to call it a competition to build very powerful AI before anyone else, and that everyone in his ear is sort of saying that, yeah, like, we have a clear pathway to superintelligence. What I don't know, and I would love to find out, is what does J D Vance thinks happens after one of these labs creates superintelligence, right?

• 10:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's a really baffling piece of this is that it seems like the accelerationists, the people who just want to take off all the guardrails and remove all the regulations and just like go full speed ahead to AGI, like, it seems like they don't Actually believe in AGI.

• 11:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 11:03Kevin Roose?

  Or at least they don't have a real clear vision of what the world will look like after it. It's a kind of techno pessimism.

• 11:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Kevin Roose?

  That's sort of masquerading as optimism. It's like, we don't actually think the people at the labs who are building this stuff, or the people who are the pioneers in deep learning, who are warning about these existential risks, like, we don't actually think they're right, but we're not going to say why, we're just kind of going to kind of like pretend it doesn't exist.

• 11:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I wrote a column this week and the headline was, America's new AI safety plan is let's see what happens. Because as far as I could tell, that's what it is. We're going to just create systems that are ever more powerful and the Trump administration is signaling they do not intend to regulate them in any meaningful way.

• 11:45Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I think this was, to me, the thing that I felt at the summit was a sense of just two sort of parallel conversations happening that have almost no points of overlap. One is the conversation that the people who are running the big AI labs and the people who are deep in the technical details of the AI itself are having, which is about the fact that we are rapidly approaching smarter than human AI systems. You know, a lot of people that we've had on the show who are running these big companies say that we could be only a year or two, or possibly three years away from AGI or something like AGI.

• 12:29Kevin Roose?

  And then you have this other conversation, which seems to be operating on a totally different timescale, which is like, let's start a blue ribbon commission to plan for how workers can adapt to AI and maybe we're going to release a report in a couple of years. I don't know what to do about reconciling those two views, but it does seem very striking that the people who are the closest to the technology, who know the trajectory that these things are on, are sounding the alarm and saying like, you all need to feel much more urgent about this. And then the politicians who just sort of are doing, I would say like a more traditional read of AI, just basically being another technology.

• 13:08Casey Newton?

  Yeah, there was this fascinating story that I saw. In the Wall Street Journal by Bell Lin. And it found that the unemployment rate in the information technology sector rose from 3.9% in December to 5.7% in January, which is way above the overall jobless rate of 4%. Why is that interesting? Well, some of the economists that Bell writes about in this piece believe that this is the first sign that AI automation is starting to cause significant job loss.

• 13:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, this is something that I've been interested in too, because I think we've all been waiting for signs that the AI gains of the past few years, the progress and the capabilities that are improving are actually translating into changes for workers. And I do think that the first place this is showing up is in software. I think, you know, I've met founders who tell me that they are no longer needing to hire junior software engineers because now a senior engineer with an AI tool can do much more work, work that might have previously required three or four people under them to do.

• 14:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah, absolutely. So I think this is important to bring up because while, you know, I am a person who likes to write about AI safety because I think that it is something that people should take seriously. For me, AI safety is kind of a proxy for just all of the disruptions that AI is going to cause in general, which I think that generally politicians and regulators pay too little attention to. And I have to tell you, there are very few things more destabilizing to the politics of any country than huge unemployment numbers. And so if we're already starting to see those creep into the picture, then I think it is a strategic mistake for folks like JD Vance to stand at a podium and say, we're not going to worry about any of this. It's just going to be go, go, go to the finish line because in truth, there might be actually a huge political problem that is bubbling up under their nose.

• 15:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and JD Vance said explicitly in his speech that he doesn't believe AI will replace workers. It will only help them, which, you know, is a, is a fine thing to believe, but it is at odds with what the people who are building this technology have said. I mean, Sam Altman has said that they are building drop-in workers, that you could just sort of hire at your company. Many, many AI leaders have said that they do expect AI to create substantial job displacement in the coming years. And so if I think if you're JD Vance or someone who's on his side of this, you actually have to do more than just say, no, it won't.

• 15:38Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 15:38Kevin Roose?

  Like you have to, you have to actually explain why you believe that the people who worry about AI creating job loss are being irrational.

• 15:46Casey Newton?

  Yes, absolutely. Let me throw one more statistic at you. So this week Anthropic put out this new economic index where they're publishing a lot of data about the impact of AI on the economy as we know it so far. And one of the things that they found is that right now, AI use leans more toward augmentation of what a human being can do than replacing them outright, but maybe not by as big a margin as you might think. What they found is that about 57% of the AI use that they are seeing in their own tools is augmentation of what humans can do, but 43% is automation. So let's assume that number goes up over time. This stuff is going to get real in a hurry.

• 16:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So I think the jobs area is one where the sort of JD Vance vision of this is all going to be great. And if you're saying otherwise, you're just like a pessimistic doomer is going to clash with observable reality. But I also, I had a conversation with an AI safety person at the summit who was just sort of making the point that taking these extreme risks seriously is a prerequisite for acceleration. It is not actually opposed to acceleration. And the example that he used from historical analogues was nuclear power. So we had nuclear power in the 20th century and then Chernobyl happened and Three

• 17:12Kevin Roose?

  Mile Island happened. And it really delayed the popularization of nuclear energy by several decades. It's only recently that countries have started to build new nuclear power plants. And it's not actually because they took the risks of nuclear power to

• 17:31Kevin Roose?

  Seriously, it's because the people who are engineering the plants during the first wave of nuclear power didn't make them safe enough. And so the analogy that this person was drawing to AI is like, if you want to accelerate this technology, if you want to allow it to move as quickly as possible, then you actually have to think about safety, because if you don't, then something catastrophic is going to happen. And when that catastrophic thing happens, people are going to react very strongly to that. And you end up delaying this technology more than it would have been delayed if you had just taken safety more seriously in the first place. So what do you make of that analogy?

• 18:10Casey Newton?

  I think it is. It is such an important point, and it is something that I wish the folks who are so dead set on acceleration would pay attention to.

• 18:19Kevin Roose?

  One more thing happened in Paris that was notable, which is that there was this big dinner with the heads of state and the leaders of the AI companies. And at that dinner, while Sam Altman was sitting next to J D Vance, the news came in that Elon Musk was proposing to acquire the nonprofit of OpenAI for something like $97.4 billion.

• 18:45Casey Newton?

  Yes, and this appears to be a trademark piece of legal trolling by Musk and his allies. OpenAI is, of course, in the midst of trying to convert itself into a for-profit. And in order to do that, the nonprofit has to get a fair price for the assets of the for-profit. And this bit of trolling from Musk could make that more complicated.

• 19:09Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this is all very complicated. We'll get into it probably in a future episode. I imagine that this is not the last time we'll talk about this OpenAI restructuring and some of the challenges there. But suffice to say, Elon Musk did not like the idea of an AI summit happening in Paris without him. And so he figured out a way to insert himself into the conversation.

• 19:29Casey Newton?

  It's amazing Elon Musk had time to do that in the midst of dismantling the entire federal government.

• 19:37Casey Newton?

  Now, Kevin, often at these summits, some sort of declaration comes out that tries to signal some spirit of collaboration. Here are some things we're going to work on together. And how did the United States feel about the declaration that came out of this summit?

• 19:53Kevin Roose?

  Well, not great is the short answer. So there was a draft that was leaked before the actual final version of this statement went around. It was pretty watered down already. It did not talk a lot about risks and harms that might result from AI. But the US wouldn't even agree to sign that statement, possibly due to some language in there about making sure that AI was inclusive, which I imagine to the people in the Trump administration, that just sounded a little too woke for them. So the US did not sign this. The UK also did not sign this. And I would say that most of the people who looked at this statement thought it was lacking in one way or another.

• 20:35Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, love the idea of a summit that produces a completely anodyne statement that commits nobody to anything that is still considered too restrictive for global superpowers to sign.

• 20:47Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Casey Newton?

  China signed it.

• 20:49Kevin Roose?

  They did.

• 20:49Casey Newton?

  That was nice.

• 20:50Kevin Roose?

  So I was, I was thinking on the plane ride back from Paris about sort of what I would take away from this summit, because I do think-

• 20:58Casey Newton?

  Number one, a whole bunch of croissants. Number two?

• 21:02Kevin Roose?

  I did bring back one, one pastry for my wife.

• 21:06Casey Newton?

  Smart.

• 21:06Kevin Roose?

  Although it got crushed in my luggage.

• 21:07Casey Newton?

  Oh, no. Sacre bleu.

• 21:09Kevin Roose?

  Sacre bleu. So I think the, the major takeaway at the sort of biggest possible level is that we are just not going to see the kind of international AI safety cooperation that I think a lot of people had hoped for. You know, there was this idea that there would be sort of a new United Nations type structure that would sort of emerge where governments all over the world would see it in their common interest to cooperate in making rules to govern the, the AI systems that were becoming increasingly powerful. I do not think that is going to happen after going to this summit. I think that countries are going to take a much more nationalistic approach to this. They will want to win.

• 21:54Kevin Roose?

  They will not want to cooperate. For the most part, I think that I also realized that in the United States, during the Trump administration, we are not going to get any meaningful AI safety regulations at the federal level. There may be some stuff happening at the state level, but I think we have pretty clearly seen J.D. Vance signal that the administration's position is kind of the all-gas, no-brakes position when it comes to AI.

• 22:21Casey Newton?

  Hmm. So it sounds like it was more of an inaction summit.

• 22:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it was kind of an action summit to say, we're not going to take any action.

• 22:32Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we're going to talk about a different kind of AI action. How AI might be helping you get some action on dating apps this Valentine's Day.

• 22:52Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, this episode is coming out on Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day.

• 22:57Casey Newton?

  Happy Valentine's Day, Kevin. Love is in the air, and today we want to talk about it.

• 23:02Kevin Roose?

  Yes, we have a Valentine's Day special. Today, we are going to talk specifically about dating apps.

• 23:08Casey Newton?

  Kevin, I think that this conversation is coming at a perfect time for us because, well, on one hand, dating apps remain a very popular way for people of all ages to meet each other. They've also been going through a really hard time. If you go online, you find mounting frustrations from users who feel like dating apps are sort of finding more and more ways to charge them. And people feel like, essentially, you're extracting more and more money from me, I'm going on fewer and fewer dates, I have not found the love of my life, and something needs to change. So there's a lot of frustration out there.

• 23:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and part of that may be that these apps are just not doing as good a job as they used to of getting people connected to their matches. But I think there's also this question of whether dating as a whole is less popular than it used to be.

• 23:52Casey Newton?

  It could be, but what we know is that the CEOs of the dating apps are proposing a solution, Kevin, and it is the same solution that CEOs of every kind of app are proposing these days, which is they're going to sprinkle some AI on it.

• 24:04Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So today, we're going to take A look at how AI is reshaping or not reshaping the world of dating. And we're going to do this in two parts. First, we are going to focus on where things stand with AI features on dating apps right now. And what one power user of a dating app called Hinge is learning about the way that AI can both help and potentially hurt finding matches online. And in the second half, we're going to talk with Justin McLeod, who's the CEO of Hinge, about how he thinks AI will transform the experience of online dating.

• 24:43Casey Newton?

  And by the end of all of that, Kevin, we hope you have found love, not just for our super user, but for all Americans.

• 24:49Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, yeah. And maybe find it in a hopeless place.

• 24:51Casey Newton?

  Hmm. Well, let me say, dating apps more often than not do feel like hopeless places. So let's hope we can find some love there.

• 24:58Kevin Roose?

  So to start, we've invited on our resident dater on Hard Fork, our producer, Rachel Cohn. Rachel's credentials include being the only single person on our team, going on a lot of Hinge dates.

• 25:10Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 25:10Kevin Roose?

  And being very open about her experiments with finding love.

• 25:15Casey Newton?

  Crazy open.

• 25:16Kevin Roose?

  Yes. She writes a great newsletter on Substack called Are You My Boyfriend? Where she talks about her experiences in dating. And today she's going to tell us about what happened when she followed all of the advice of Hinge's new AI tool to tweak her profile and find more matches.

• 25:32Casey Newton?

  Oh, let's find out how that went.

• 25:39Kevin Roose?

  Rachel Cohn, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 25:41Speaker 03

  Hey, guys.

• 25:42Casey Newton?

  Rachel, it's great to have you here. Let's talk about this experiment.

• 25:46Kevin Roose?

  What are you talking about have you here? She produces the show.

• 25:49Casey Newton?

  That's what I mean. It's great for her to be here with us, talking to us.

• 25:52Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  It does feel really formal.

• 25:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it's fun to be in front of the mic for a change. So now, Rachel, back when I was doing online dating, I was mostly on Tinder. But for this experiment, you've decided to use Hinge. Tell us about why you made that choice.

• 26:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Tinder is actually like the biggest app. This is like, has the largest number of users in terms of dating apps in the US and also globally. But Hinge is one of the fastest growing right now. And you know, for me, I'm thirty, I'm in New York, I'm straight. Everyone that I know is on Hinge.

• 26:25Kevin Roose?

  Right, it's the cool kids dating app.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  Totally. The, the other thing that I think is like really relevant to what I'm going to tell you guys is Hinge has like really marketed itself very intentionally as a place for serious relationships. That's also really interesting in terms of thinking about how AI is going to be incorporated into the app. Because it seems the most potentially problematic for Hinge's brand identity, which is all about like meaningful human connection to be infusing a bunch of AI into the platform.

• 26:55Kevin Roose?

  Got it.

• 26:55Casey Newton?

  Got it. So it's one of the most popular and maybe it has the most to lose with this pivot to AI.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's fair.

• 27:02Casey Newton?

  All right. So we've picked Hinge as our sort of experiment bed. What was the experiment that you ran?

• 27:08Speaker 03

  Okay, so Match Group, which is the parent company that owns a bunch of dating apps, including Hinge. They had this big Investor Day back in December where CEOs from several of the different dating apps got up on a stage and talked about what the new AI tools were that they were going to roll out on the platforms. And Hinge chalked up, you know, these two different kinds of big buckets of features that they were going to roll out. One is something that is not yet out, that they would not give me access to. Apparently it's coming next month. Which is using AI to kind of like better make matches, improving the algorithm in some way. The other tool, or the other bucket of category that they are working on is AI for what they're calling the struggling dater.

• 27:53Casey Newton?

  Now, do you identify as a struggling dater?

• 27:55Speaker 03

  So that's a good question. I would say it depends what we mean by struggling. I'm struggling in the sense that I have been like really actively dating for two and a half years and I still haven't found the right person. But I'm not struggling in the sense that my issue is getting dates through Hinge.

• 28:11Casey Newton?

  I see. Okay. All right. So in some cases, struggling, in other cases, thriving.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Some would say.

• 28:17Kevin Roose?

  To put it in business terms, the top of the funnel is

• 28:21Casey Newton?

  Is great.

• 28:21Kevin Roose?

  is great. But it's the conversion.

• 28:24Casey Newton?

  We gotta convert.

• 28:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, you gotta convert.

• 28:25Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 28:26Casey Newton?

  And that's where AI rolls in. Is that right?

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Okay, well, so this is like sort of what's unclear to me. I'm gonna be really curious what you guys think about this tool. But so the one tool that they allowed me to use and that everyone can actually use now, this is totally public. It came out a month ago. It's called AI prompt feedback. So the whole point of this tool, very simple. They have some kind of AI model that is looking at your written responses on your dating profile and giving you feedback on those written responses so that you can improve what you have on your profile.

• 28:56Kevin Roose?

  So Rachel, wait, I'm gonna ask you to slow down because I met my wife back in the Stone Ages. We met like face to face, like Neanderthals. And I have not spent time on dating apps as a result. So my understanding is that you have, you know, a profile that you fill out. It's got things on it, like your interests and where you went to school and what you do.

• 29:18Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 29:19Kevin Roose?

  And what you're saying is this is basically like an AI coach that will sort of look at your profile and tell you like, this could be punched up, this could be funnier, maybe don't say that thing about your body odor. Like it's sort of like goes through your profile and critiques it for you. Is that what I'm hearing?

• 29:37Speaker 03

  Yes. Okay. So Hinge actually requires you, like in order to set up a profile, you have to choose from a preset number of sort of prompts. They have things like together, we could, and then you know, you fill it out.

• 29:48Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Can I tell you my favorite example? One of the, one of the classic Hinge prompts is I go crazy for. And one time I, I, I saw somebody on Twitter just post, I go crazy for food. And that really tells you a lot about the sort of median level of writing on these profiles, Kevin.

• 30:06Kevin Roose?

  Got it.

• 30:07Casey Newton?

  Uh, okay. So that's kind of the, the setup here. We, Kevin now understands what an online dating profile is. And the rest of us understand that Hinge has these prompts, you know, which, which can sort of show off your personality. But maybe the average ones are, you know, pretty, pretty flat, you know, pretty non-unique maybe. So then along comes AI and there's a tool and Rachel, you use this tool.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Okay. Yeah. So I'm gonna actually share a PowerPoint with you guys.

• 30:35Casey Newton?

  Oh, good.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  But we'll talk through this for our listeners who are not tuning into our YouTube. Okay, share.

• 30:42Casey Newton?

  For the listener, we're now in a Google Slides presentation.

• 30:46Kevin Roose?

  Can I just say, this is so Rachel.

• 30:48Casey Newton?

  This is so, it's very Rachel. Okay, so here we're about to look at Rachel's original written prompts before AI intervened.

• 30:59Speaker 03

  Oh, yes. Okay, so before I tell you about what these written prompts are, I'm just gonna tell you what kinds of responses this AI algorithm gives, because even though it will give you very personalized, specific feedback, it actually only has three kind of like topline categories of notes it will give you. So the three categories are, it will either say, "Great answer," which means like, you know, you don't need to change anything, you're doing a great job, "Try a small change," meaning, you know, make a little tweak, or "Go deeper," which I have interpreted to mean, "You really need to be more vulnerable, you are not sharing enough about yourself."

• 31:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you need to look within yourself and find something more interesting about yourself.

• 31:38Kevin Roose?

  So it will never say, "Go shallower," like you're oversharing, maybe take out that part about your childhood trauma?

• 31:44Speaker 03

  Yes, you are going to see, it will never say, "Go shallower," it really, really loves specificity.

• 31:49Kevin Roose?

  Okay, let's go, let's see.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Okay, so these were like my original prompts. Miraculously, this is not planned, I actually got all three kinds of feedback, which is very useful for this experiment. So I got one great answer, one try a small change, one go deeper. We can start with my great answer, because that's the one I did not change.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  And that's here, so the prompt was "My simple pleasures." Do you guys want to read it?

• 32:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so Rachel's simple pleasures would include writing down a funny piece of conversation she overheard on the subway, dancing a little bit on a run, and making incredibly average watercolor paintings. This is a great answer.

• 32:26Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Casey Newton?

  It's fun, it's specific, it's a little self-deprecating, and if you're using Hinge, you've never seen that answer before.

• 32:34Kevin Roose?

  Correct.

• 32:35Speaker 03

  Wow, thank you.

• 32:35Kevin Roose?

  So that was, that one, the AI said, "You killed it, no change, no notes."

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, and to exactly your point, it said, "It showcases your personality and invites fun conversation about art and humor."

• 32:47Casey Newton?

  Okay, so that's a, that's a great one. Let's take a look at a prompt where maybe we could use a small change.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  Okay, great. So here was my original one. I'm just gonna read this one out to you. So the, the, the prompt was my greatest strength. And my original answer was getting people to share stuff they normally wouldn't or shouldn't. This is very useful for my job, but sometimes gets me into trouble in my personal life. What do you guys think?

• 33:13Kevin Roose?

  I like it. It's a little dangerous. It makes you sound like, you know, you're like Sherlock Holmes.

• 33:21Casey Newton?

  I can see how maybe some people would sort of, that might rub them the wrong way, right? Cause like dating is a little bit vulnerable and maybe they read that and they think, okay, if I'm gonna go on a first date with Rachel, maybe this is gonna feel a little bit like an interrogation and I have, I have my walls up, you know? So I could see how maybe, you know, fewer people might be interested in that one.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  I think that's a totally fair point. I will say like my own thinking about this is sometimes when I'm creating my responses to prompts, I'm actually thinking about like not what is gonna like appeal to everyone, but what is actually gonna push certain people away, like the people who will not be compatible with me.

• 33:57Kevin Roose?

  I see.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  But, but I think that, that's a really good point. Interestingly, that is not the thing that the AI focused on. So the feedback I got from the AI was basically just that it wanted me to be more specific, to give a specific example about a conversation I had had or something that I learned about someone. So I was actually trying to be like, you know, test the AI a little bit here, be a little bit funny and see if it would, you know, tell me like this is not a good idea to give that kind of an example. So the way I tweaked it first is I said my greatest strength, again, getting people to share stuff they normally wouldn't or shouldn't, like how much money they make or what they most regret in life. This makes me feel bonded to people, like together we share a secret.

• 34:39Kevin Roose?

  That's good.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  Well, maybe.

• 34:40Casey Newton?

  No, I like, I like the last one better.

• 34:42Kevin Roose?

  You really?

• 34:42Casey Newton?

  Yes. Like who wants to go into a first date being like this woman is on a mission to get me to reveal my salary?

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly.

• 34:50Kevin Roose?

  As she said, it's a mechanism to filter out people. If you're opposed to salary transparency, you're not going to enjoy going on a deal with Rachel Cohn.

• 34:58Casey Newton?

  I don't know.

• 34:59Kevin Roose?

  That's just the filter that she's setting up.

• 35:01Speaker 03

  No, I'm with Casey on this. I think this is bad. I was hoping the AI would say like, listen, that's going to be off putting to some people. But it did not. It just said, if you want to add more, consider sharing why you enjoyed these conversations or a specific example. It wants me to be more specific. So I updated it again. Also, mind you, you can see here if you're like looking. I have now hit the, like, I am three characters away from the limit. So it's very hard to satisfy the AI and also stay within the character count. So finally, here's the one that actually worked. This took me so long. I was workshopping this at a dinner with friends. My friends are like racking their brains for like the kind of questions I ask. Also, like every time we would try something, I would run out of characters. Finally, I like sort of like broke the whole structure again.

• 35:45Speaker 03

  And I was like, okay, I'm really just going to tell one story. So this is what I ultimately ended up with. My greatest strength, getting people to share stuff they normally wouldn't or shouldn't. Like recently, at a wedding, a stranger told me how much money he made and why he felt constrained in his relationship. It gave us a shared secret.

• 36:04Kevin Roose?

  And how much money did he make?

• 36:06Speaker 03

  I cannot say that.

• 36:08Casey Newton?

  Wow. Wow, you turn the tables and all of a sudden she clams up. Okay, so this now here, for reasons that remain unknown to me, we have finally satisfied the AI and this is a great answer.

• 36:21Speaker 03

  Do you feel that way? Because I mean, I'm curious. Do you think this is better than what I had originally?

• 36:25Casey Newton?

  I, no, no. Because here's the thing. I don't read that and I think, oh, like now I understand that something about Rachel. What I understand something about a stranger you met at a wedding. Do you know what I mean?

• 36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Do you feel that same way, Kevin?

• 36:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I, well, I think it's a little better because it sort of conjures the image of you like going up to someone and getting a stranger to tell you their secrets and makes you think. But it still has the same issue, which is if I'm a person with a lot of secrets, I'm turned off by this.

• 36:54Casey Newton?

  Here's what, here's how I would do it. I would do it more like my greatest strength is accidentally getting people to reveal things. Like for example. Make it seem like people cannot wait to tell you things. If it makes it seem like you're constantly prying for information, that's a turn off. But if it's, I'm so sort of effervescent and bubbly.

• 37:10Kevin Roose?

  Charismatic.

• 37:11Casey Newton?

  And people can't wait to tell me their secrets, now I'm interested.

• 37:14Speaker 03

  That's actually, that's really smart. I feel like that's not totally the truth about me.

• 37:19Kevin Roose?

  He's a speed dating coach.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Uh, that is definitely a more appealing way to sell myself to people.

• 37:23Casey Newton?

  All right. So we've managed to best the AI one time.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Okay, yes.

• 37:26Casey Newton?

  Very interesting. Now let's look at the next one.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  All right. So this is the one that was like, go deeper. So this is the one I needed apparently the most help with. And I was actually really surprised by this one because my original prompt was, I'm looking for, and I wrote, someone to read a book next to you in bed. And let me tell you, this

• 37:42Kevin Roose?

  That's cute.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  This crushes on Hinge. This like, I get more responses on this than any of the other ones. So many men will send me just like a hard eyes emoji, or you know, people will say like, what book are you reading?

• 37:54Kevin Roose?

  Oh.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  You know, just to state the obvious here. I think part of like, what's great about this response.

• 37:59Kevin Roose?

  It's also aspirational because in reality, what, what you're gonna do with the people that you're dating is watch TikToks in bed next to them.

• 38:06Casey Newton?

  Wait, stop it. Rachel, what were you gonna say?

• 38:09Speaker 03

  No, that's actually so fair. Um, but yeah, no, what I was gonna say is I think like, part of what works about this is that it's like intentionally vague so that like, you as a, you know, potential suitor for me, or whatever, potential match for me, can like, project your, yourself here.

• 38:23Casey Newton?

  Well, let me say another obvious thing. Uh, it also implies that you're in bed together. That's appealing to a lot of men as they're browsing through the Hinge app. So it has that going for it. But to me, this is a perfect answer because it is sweet, it is specific enough, it is intimate, it is inviting.

• 38:39Kevin Roose?

  And it gives men the opportunity to brag to you about the books that they're reading.

• 38:43Casey Newton?

  Exactly.

• 38:44Kevin Roose?

  That is the key piece to me.

• 38:46Casey Newton?

  So this is a perfect answer to which the Hinge AI naturally said, let's go a little deeper.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:50Casey Newton?

  And so how did you try to do that, Rachel?

• 38:52Speaker 03

  All right. So, um, it said, try adding more details about your favorite books or genres. It helps show your interests. So, uh, I actually originally changed it to, I'm looking for someone to read a historical fiction book next to you in bed. And it said, basically, try again. And it suggested that I could actually solicit recommendations. So I tried again and I said, someone to read a historical fiction book next to in bed, open to Rex, exclamation mark.

• 39:16Kevin Roose?

  Ooh.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Which I feel like, I know, I feel like it's so grinch.

• 39:20Kevin Roose?

  All of a sudden, I'm dating Goodreads.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's like, am I trying to meet someone? Or am I just trying to to get book recommendations? But the AI still wanted me to be even more specific. It said, if you want to add more, consider sharing your favorite historical fiction titles. What draws you to this genre?

• 39:39Casey Newton?

  Now, see, again, the the AI has just been tuned wrong, right? Because the AI has been tuned to say, make sure to ask for specifics. Make sure to ask for details, which can be really good on a prompt. And I do think is a message that a lot of online daters need to to learn. But because it has no human sense of what is actually cute, it could not read Rachel's original prompt and understand all of the ways in which it would obviously appeal to a lot of people.

• 40:04Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 40:05Casey Newton?

  So I'm actually giving the AI a failing grade on this one.

• 40:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I'm not impressed. And I liked your original better.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Thank you. I agree. I I don't love this one. But here here's where I ended up that actually made the AI happy. So I ended up with, I'm looking for someone to read a historical fiction book next to in bed. Open to Rex exclamation mark, especially love stories set in New York City.

• 40:27Casey Newton?

  No, no.

• 40:28Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's delete. It's giving LinkedIn.

• 40:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, goodbye.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Okay, well, I I thought the same thing. But I changed this a little over a week ago. And you guys, I was very surprised. I actually got a lot more engagement.

• 40:42Casey Newton?

  Oh, my gosh, really?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  So wait, let me show you. This next slide is responses from men specifically on to this book one. And so I have here someone who's written to me like, okay, it's not New York City related, but it's definitely love and historical fiction. Let me know if you're interested. It's a Pulitzer Prize winner. I love this one, too, because they they didn't give me the the book in the actual initial message. So exactly. So I have to match with them to get the name of the book. And then, you know, something similar here, and someone's recommending a specific book.

• 41:12Kevin Roose?

  Now, I have a question about this, Rachel.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:15Kevin Roose?

  So my presumption is that some of the men on dating apps are also using AI to craft their responses. So what is your sense of whether these people are kind of running your prompt through an AI and just copying and pasting what the AI tells them?

• 41:35Speaker 03

  I would say that I personally do not think I have come across many people who are using AI. And there are a few reasons that I feel that way. One is that the grammar is horrible, horrible. Also, just I don't know, even if you look at these two examples, like, this feels very. Specific and like not something AI would have come up with.

• 41:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Well, I mean, I mean, these are both, you know, really good responses. They're very engaging. I do think that they they reveal something that the AI has picked up on, which is that if you ask a man to recommend something, he is unfortunately going to have an opinion about that that he might want to share with you.

• 42:08Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 42:08Casey Newton?

  So that was smart. Now, Rachel, I'm seeing in this screenshot that your battery was all the way down at 19%. Do you usually let it get that low?

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Actually, my battery's at 3% in that other one. Yes, actually, this is a huge complaint amongst my friends is that my phone is always dying and I refuse to invest in a

• 42:22Casey Newton?

  Can we get you like a battery pack? Yeah, that's that's my that's our Valentine's Day message here. We're getting you a battery pack.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  That would actually be so useful.

• 42:29Casey Newton?

  Let's keep going. What else did we learn?

• 42:31Kevin Roose?

  What is your overall impression of this AI feature? Did it? Do you think it helped you make more matches? Do you think it helped you get better matches? How useful is this AI feature for struggling daters?

• 42:44Speaker 03

  My initial reaction to this tool, when I started using it, was sort of similar to, I think, how you guys are feeling, which is like, this AI is not tuned properly. It like does not understand humor. It does not understand all these important features about like, you know, being sort of mysterious and dating. But actually, now that I went through the process and did have more people engaging me, I do have this sense that it it did do something very useful for people, which is I do think it gave them like a more concrete, like narrower, and maybe more like vivid picture of me. And and it sort of reminded me of like what

• 43:25Speaker 03

  happens to high school students when they are like being coached by guidance counselors to apply to college. Like, you end up having to sell a very specific story about yourself, which everyone knows is like a little bit reductive and not totally authentic. But like, there's a reason that you're coached to do that. The reason is that like, for, you know, people who are screening applicants, it's easier to have a vision of the person and have some sort of visceral reactions like, should we admit that person or not? I think the same is true in dating to some extent.

• 43:55Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it also just seems like maybe there's a point like this. This seems like a very minor kind of augmentation of your dating profile, but I think you can imagine a scenario where just AI is allowed to kind of write your whole profile for you. Or like, maybe it goes through your social media or your LinkedIn, or you write it a little description of yourself and then it crafts a profile for you. But I think at a, at some point, it would start to feel like an inauthentic representation of who you were if you hadn't actually done the writing of the profile yourself. Did you feel at all like that? Like you were maybe, I don't know, giving over this very personal thing to an AI that doesn't actually know you that well?

• 44:37Speaker 03

  So I mean, I think that this was actually something smart that Hinge clearly, very intentionally did. Like, part of what makes the tool not that helpful, but also what prevents exactly what you're talking about, is they don't actually tell you, like, here's what you should stay and said. They just give you sort of the same advice that like, an English teacher in middle school would give you, which is like, show, don't tell, give more examples. And I found that, actually, I found it extremely hard. Like, it took me, in one instance, like actively playing away at this, like, a full 30 minutes of tweaking and rewriting. And you know, like, that's a huge time commitment. And yeah, it was, it was really hard to satisfy the AI.

• 45:17Kevin Roose?

  What I'm curious about is what will be the experience of the median Hinge user? Because you are not the median Hinge user. You are a great writer. You work in media. You know how to sell a story. You're gorgeous. You're charming. You don't need the help of an AI, okay? But when I think about all the Hinge profiles that I used to see of these guys, and you know, be like, what are your interests? And it would be coffee, food, and travel. And I thought, I don't know one thing about you. Like, obviously, you like food.

• 45:46Casey Newton?

  We all eat it every day, right? So I'm curious for those people, how useful do you think this kind of tool can be? Can it get them from I love coffee, travel, food to actually sharing something revealing about themselves?

• 46:00Speaker 03

  So this is like my big question that I am really hoping you guys will push Justin, the CEO of Hinge on, which is like, exactly, they have marketed this tool, especially like to investors at least, as a tool for struggling daters. What do we know about struggling daters? They either don't put much time and effort into their profile, or they are not sort of comfortable putting themselves out there. I don't see how an AI telling them, "Share a little bit more about yourself," is going to actually help those people. You know, if you're someone who's writing, "What do I order for the table? Pizza." Like, I think that is an intentional choice.

• 46:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Well, Rachel, this is a fascinating experiment, and thank you for walking us through it. If people want to date you, how can they get in touch?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  Actually, they could check out my newsletter and write to me there.

• 46:50Casey Newton?

  Yes, it's a very good newsletter, and if any Hard Fork listeners want to go check it out and maybe shoot their shot on Hinge, they can find you there, too. Thank you so much, Rachel.

• 47:00Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys.

• 47:01Casey Newton?

  Happy Valentine's Day.

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Happy Valentine's Day.

• 47:05Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, a lot hinges on our next segment. Yeah? Hinge CEO Justin MacLeod is here. That's when we come back.

• 47:33Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin, well, now that we've heard Rachel's experience on Hinge, I think it's time to take that feedback straight to the source. Let's bring in Justin MacLeod. He's the CEO of Hinge, and he's been thinking a lot lately about the future of AI in dating. Yeah, let's get a little unhinged. He'll be joining us from the MacLeod. All right.

• 47:58Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 48:04Kevin Roose?

  Justin McLeod, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 48:06Speaker 04

  Hi, thank you for having me. Really appreciate it.

• 48:09Kevin Roose?

  Well, we couldn't think of a better CEO to have on our Valentine's Day episode. I have to imagine that Valentine's Day is big over at Hinge. Like, is this like tax season over at Hinge for you guys?

• 48:20Speaker 04

  In the early days, we actually used to give Valentine's Day as a holiday to all of our employees. But, you know, interestingly, Valentine's Day is really a day for couples and less for singles. So it's a bit of a tricky love-hate relationship with Valentine's Day for Hinge.

• 48:35Casey Newton?

  I have to tell you a story, which is that when I was single, I had a friend who was like, if you're gonna find somebody, you have to like subscribe to the premium version of one of these dating apps. So I actually bought Tinder Premium on Valentine's Day. And like every year for like, you know, three or four years, it would renew on Valentine's Day.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  You'd get the renewal.

• 48:52Casey Newton?

  Exactly. And it was always just a reminder that I hadn't quite yet figured things out. So in that way, Valentine's Day was big for me.

• 48:59Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, now, Justin, I understand you have kind of a wild story about meeting your wife. Do you want to tell us that story?

• 49:08Speaker 04

  Oh, I mean, we could take the whole podcast for the story. It's a long one. Well, I married my college sweetheart, but we had an eight-year break where we didn't speak to each other. And I started Hinge during that period, about halfway through that period. And I let her know I included her on all the launch emails. And...

• 49:30Casey Newton?

  Just be like, "Hey, Justin Casey, what is up there?"

• 49:32Speaker 04

  You know, I'm still...

• 49:34Kevin Roose?

  Wink, wink.

• 49:34Speaker 04

  But the short version is that about a month before she was out to get married to someone else, I flew over to Switzerland and asked her to call off the wedding. And she moved back to New York. And yeah, and actually, we just had our eight-year wedding anniversary yesterday.

• 49:51Casey Newton?

  Ah, happy anniversary.

• 49:52Kevin Roose?

  Happy anniversary.

• 49:53Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 49:54Kevin Roose?

  We have just talked with our producer, Rachel, about her experience using some new AI features on Hinge.

• 50:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and spoiler alert, she's still single. Let's just say that.

• 50:06Casey Newton?

  Yes, and I've only ever had an experience of AI trying to break up my relationship. But you all think that you can use AI to help people get into relationships. So tell us about the overall picture you see of how AI and dating apps are poised to intersect.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I'm sure you all are thinking about this a lot, but AI is going to be a pretty disruptive and transformative force in a whole lot of industries, and I don't think dating is any different than that. I think that when I see what's coming, it's going to be a bigger transition than even what happened with the transition to mobile. And there are a couple of big ways that I think this is really going to come to life. One is personalized matching and two is effective coaching. So personalized matching is getting to know our daters on a much deeper level about who they are, what they're looking for, and being able to make just much more thoughtful matches with people

• 51:04Speaker 04

  that go two or three or four or five levels deep to make sure that they're aligned, so that you don't end up with someone that three months in you realize you're misaligned on some major sense of your values or you're misaligned on your goals and expectations.

• 51:17Casey Newton?

  The alignment problem. No, that's something else.

• 51:20Casey Newton?

  The other alignment problem.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Right. So that's one piece of it. I think it's just like much more thoughtful matching. We're going to be able to ask much more nuanced and deeper questions, understand much more nuanced feedback. The other big vector is the coaching piece, which we have a whole lot of daters who really struggle to get on that first date or even get that first match. And they don't always know why. Is it the photos they chose? Is it the prompts they're writing? And we can help push people and guide people to fill out their profiles well, take the right actions, just not get in their own way, because none of us are born good at dating apps.

• 51:56Casey Newton?

  So those are two potentially useful approaches. Maybe let's take them in order a little bit. I want to ask about this idea of the AI matchmaking. So my understanding is that for a long time, dating apps have used various machine learning algorithms to pair people up. They seem to be sort of grouping and scoring people along certain criteria. Maybe, you know, sort of how attractive is this person viewed within the community? That sort of thing. What are those next two or three layers? What are the other signals that you could glean? And what makes you confident that they would paint a picture of somebody that was actually useful in connecting them to somebody else?

• 52:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's a number of different ways to think about this. First of all, when Hinge launched back in, well, the version of Hinge today back in 2015, the algorithm was mostly driven by not even so much information that we knew about you, but more about your relationship to other people in the app. So who did you like? Did other people who liked that person also like this person? So maybe we'll suggest this person to you. It was a lot of, you guys are technical, so collaborative filtering kind of models as opposed to content based. So one is just moving into a much more content based world where we're actually taking a look at your photos, actually reading your prompts, using that information to make much more thoughtful and intelligent matches. So that's one layer.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  We can start to ask much more nuanced questions that don't always fit into an easy multi-select dropdown option of like, what is your religion? Or what's your height? But understanding your backstory and what matters to you and what your relationship history is and using all that information to first just make the logical connections that you would make to make much more thoughtful matches. And then there's a whole other layer to that that I'm excited that we're already starting to explore, which is how do we use relationship science? There's a lot of papers out there and a lot of people who have thought about what types of personalities do well together? What leads to long-term relationship? And being able to actually bring, not just to learn your tastes and their tastes and see a likelihood of an initial match, but actually think more deeply about long-term compatibility.

• 54:01Casey Newton?

  Right. Let me ask the cynical question because I think some listeners are maybe going to be thinking this, which is when you're on an online dating app, isn't 90% of them just whether you think they look cute in their photos? Like, is there really that much deeper left to plum with AI and all the rest?

• 54:16Speaker 04

  I think that there's a ton. I think when photos, a lot of people will make snap judgments based on photos, but that's just foot in the door. Then there's a whole lot of other aspects that matter, whether you're actually going to show up on a date with this person and get along and want to go out on a second date. And that's why I think Hinge has been so successful, because we haven't really based it on photos. If you like someone, you actually have to go through their profile and choose something about them that you did like. Everyone has to fill out three prompts. Let's say it looks matter, too, and it's kind of the easiest thing to make a snap judgment on, but there's a whole lot that comes after getting your foot in the door with regard to looks.

• 54:52Kevin Roose?

  Got it. Well, let's talk about the coaching piece of this, too. So we just talked with our producer, Rachel, about this new prompt feedback tool that you all have rolled out. What other ways are you seeing AI be potentially useful in coaching users on Hinge?

• 55:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's going to run the gamut from, starting with tips and tools, all the way to really helping people navigate the emotional ups and downs and maintaining a sense of confidence and hopefulness through their journey. We're starting with the tips and tools. So that's things like a photo finder. We can, we can learn what types of photos do well on Hinge and what don't, and build models that we can help you choose which photos to select for your dating profile. Another one is prompt feedback, which is a really exciting thing that we just launched. And we've learned that through that, through that feature, we were able to triple the incidence of high-quality prompt answers and reduce by more than a third those kind of low-quality, like one-word answers, which is, which is pretty transformative.

• 55:51Casey Newton?

  So I want to understand a little bit about how you built this system and what it is looking for. As we were looking through Rachel's prompts, it seemed like mostly what the AI was trying to do was to elicit more specificity in, in her answer. So I'm guessing that's kind of one of the criteria. Are there others? And how did you come up with what essentially were the criteria that you were going to use to say, this is a great prompt versus go back to the drawing board?

• 56:19Speaker 04

  There are a few different criteria in terms of just, is this easy to start a conversation from? Specificity is a big thing, because the more specific it is, the more it lets people in. Does it reveal something about you?

• 56:33Speaker 04

  It is largely pushing people towards the more specificity when they respond.

• 56:38Kevin Roose?

  And is that rooted in, like, you have an empirical sense that when people are sort of more specific when they write these prompts, they tend to get more answers and meet more people?

• 56:48Speaker 04

  Definitely. And we've been doing that since the beginning, not just looking, by the way, at the prompt answers, but also the prompt questions, like what types of questions actually lead to people responding in a way that leads to a date. And we think about this kind of efficiency frontier vulnerability, where there are some questions we can ask that people feel very comfortable answering, but don't lead to a date, like my go-to karaoke song, which everyone's willing to answer and leads to a date never. And then there are things that, you know, like what I wish I could change with my relationship with my mother, that if you answer, might lead to a really in-depth conversation about your values and everything else, but, you know, no one's really willing to do that.

• 57:27Kevin Roose?

  That's a lot to post online for everyone to see.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. So there's this like sweet spot that we're always trying to navigate at Hinge about like, where is the point at which people are willing to share? And where is the point that actually lets other people in and it's what other people want to know?

• 57:44Kevin Roose?

  Right. Now, I have a question about sort of this use of AI for improving one's profile, or, you know, maybe pointing out where your answers are a little generic, which is that if everyone is using this stuff, doesn't that kind of flatten the landscape? Doesn't that actually, because part of what you're doing when you're trying to, you know, look for people on an app like Hinge is to filter out people as well as filtering them into your set of potential matches. So if I see someone who just says, you know, I like pineapple on pizza, that may be a red flag for me because I say, oh, that person's generic, or they're not, you know, creative, or maybe we're not going to connect. If everyone is

• 58:25Kevin Roose?

  using these tools, doesn't that kind of raise the floor and make it harder to filter out people who you might not be a good match with?

• 58:32Speaker 04

  I understand what you're saying and our belief is that people really do have things to offer. Sometimes they just need a little bit of nudging and help to offer it in the right way. I personally know lots of people who are super dynamic, interesting, fun people. And then I look at their profile and they're like, can you help me with my profile? And I'm like, wow, this like completely misses you. Like you, you could do so much better here to like choose better photos or, or just represent yourself. And I think people just often don't come across well in their dating profile. And that shouldn't necessarily be the barometer for whether you're gonna have a good relationship with them or not.

• 59:05Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess to me, it, it feels a little bit like using AI to do sort of the personality equivalent of airbrushing a photo. It's like, here's the, the AI that's gonna make you seem a little more original, a little more creative, a little more charming than you maybe actually would be on your own. But maybe I'm being too cynical.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  But that's the principle between, between coaching and giving people the answers, right? We're not, we're not like you, you write a prompt answer and we're like, hey, use this one instead. We're just saying, hey, could you say a little bit more about that?

• 59:35Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  And that I think is the, just the little bit of extra nudging people need to still be in their own voice and still be authentically them. But just not be afraid to be a bit more vulnerable and a little bit more specific.

• 59:47Casey Newton?

  Yeah, to me, like the, the interesting tension that I always felt like I was navigating when I was creating an online dating profile is on one hand, you do wanna seem unique, quirky, you wanna stand out from the pack, not be like, you know, all the other guys. On the other hand, you wanted to seem normal, approachable, like a recognizable kind of person that somebody might want to go and have a drink with. And I don't know if I ever figured out exactly how far to lean in either direction. And I'm sure, you know, probably both directions work depending on which person you wanna wind up with. But I'm curious if you think AI is pushing in any particular direction. Is it always gonna push us to sort of be more unique? Or are there moments where it's gonna say, it looks like you're confessing to a felony in this prompt.

• 1:00:32Casey Newton?

  We may want to walk that back.

• 1:00:35Speaker 04

  I don't know about that latter one. So our goal is to like bring out the uniqueness in people. And that's why we're again, we're so conscious about asking you to bring your best self forward and not trying to give you the answer or write for you. I mean, AI is a tool. It can be used to flatten and it can be used to make everyone the same and tell everyone to put the same thing in the in the box. Or it can be used to like really find out what's unique about you and bring that out. And I think that is the certainly the better formula for Hinge because people are unique. People are different and we want to help them showcase that.

• 1:01:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Now, I want to ask you maybe a slight detour question, which is not specifically about AI, but is about these romance scams that we've heard so much about. I get a lot of emails from listeners and readers talking about how one of the things that makes them very wary of online dating is the prevalence of these scammers who will pretend to be interested in you. They'll send you some flirty messages. Maybe they'll even strike up a relationship with you and then they'll tell you, you know, I can help you make money trading crypto or something. And then all of a sudden your bank account is drained. So is that an area of focus for you at Hinge? Are you seeing a lot of that activity and is AI helping it all in protecting users from that?

• 1:01:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, I mean, another big advantage, I think of AI is like our, we have a very big and dedicated trust and safety team. And we don't see that as a big problem on Hinge because we really do catch people. We can look at their IP address, prior photos, behavior on the app, behavior patterns and all of that and use AI models to catch people as quickly as possible.

• 1:02:13Casey Newton?

  I want to talk about the potential use of AI in the actual conversations. When I use dating apps, I never felt more like a bot on the internet than I did in like in the first four exchanges with anyone on a Hinge, a Hinge or Tinder, right? It's like, hi, hi, how are you? Good, good. How are you? I'm good. How was your weekend? It was fine. How's yours? Right? And you just repeat that like ad infinitum. I can imagine actually just asking an AI bot to go do that on my behalf and get me to the interesting part of a conversation. I could also imagine somebody like you saying, well, I don't know if I actually want the AI to be sending the messages. So how are you thinking about letting AI do more of the writing for your users over time?

• 1:02:57Speaker 04

  Well, it's the principle of coaching. So we don't want to write for our users. So one of the great things about Hinge is that you don't just like someone, they like you back, and then you're a match go, because that does lead oftentimes to a kind of a generic exchange. On Hinge, you actually have to like something about them, and you can add a comment, and you have very rich profiles. And there's a lot of opportunity for us to help coach people to engage with a piece of content on someone's profile, whether it's a prompt or a photo. And that's something else that we are exploring, and we actually plan to start testing next quarter, is helping give people conversation starters. Again, not like what to say, but hey, like, did you notice this in their profile? Maybe this would be a good thing to ask them about.

• 1:03:40Speaker 04

  And I think that that, once again, is just giving people the right nudges to move the conversation in the right direction, so that you actually end up on a date.

• 1:03:50Casey Newton?

  Would you ever use AI to determine who is doing a lot of ghosting and saying, hmm, seems like you're leaving a lot of messages unread? Is something going on with you, Kevin?

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  Well, interestingly, I'm not sure we need AI for that. We just recently released Your Turn Limits, which was a feature precisely because of that. We looked at responsiveness on the app, and we saw that a lot of the unresponsiveness was because of just a few people who match with a lot of people and then don't respond. And so we introduced Your Turn Limits, which essentially, if it's your turn to respond in a conversation, you can only collect so many of those. I think the number is about eight, before you're blocked from sending likes or matching with new people, until you start responding to the people that you've already matched with.

• 1:04:33Casey Newton?

  That's excellent. Good job. That's good. I like that.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  Thank you. It was one of the few positive Reddit threads. We almost never see those. And it was like, wow, this feature is really amazing. We even had someone do a, like, write a one-star review on the App Store, and then come back and change it a little bit later to be like, never mind, this feature is amazing. And we saw responsiveness increase by like 20, 30%.

• 1:04:55Casey Newton?

  It speaks of something so real, though, which is that part of the fun of an app like Hinge is it gives you access to, you know, hundreds or even thousands of like really cool people, wherever you may live, but There's a sort of game-like nature to it, and it is fun to just, you know, collect matches and feel, you know, very attractive. But if you're on the other side of that and you're a human being and you're actually trying to date, like, nothing in the world is more frustrating. So that strikes me as a really good example of a feature that essentially just reminds the entire user base, you are human beings talking to other human beings, and you have to treat them with kindness and respect.

• 1:05:30Kevin Roose?

  Yes. I want to ask about the big buzzword of the year in AI, which is agents and agency. A lot of dating apps are planning, or at least talking about releasing some kind of agentic feature. The founder of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe-Hurd, got a lot of attention for some comments she made last year talking about how one day users might have an AI dating concierge who kind of goes out on to an app for you and dates other users' AI concierges and says, you know, basically, let's go on a date as proxies for these two real people and maybe see if they would be compatible. Grindr is also testing an AI wingman feature

• 1:06:12Kevin Roose?

  that will roll out in 2027 and offer suggestions like where to go on a date. Is that a direction that Hinge is thinking about? Are you at all excited about the use of AI agents to date on users' behalf?

• 1:06:26Speaker 04

  That is not something that we're looking at. And I think that we just have this principle at Hinge that AI should really stand behind us and not between us. And that means that we are not in a world where you're being replaced by agents who are dating on your behalf. Like, the journey of dating is something that I think we each need to take on our own. But having, again, the coaching and the nudging can be very, very helpful to people. I also think just practically and technically, we're not even close to a world where you could train an agent to be enough in your voice and understand your values and personalities and actually learn these things on your behalf.

• 1:07:05Casey Newton?

  Totally. I hear a story like that. I'm like, this is just like science fiction that you're telling your shareholders so that your stock price goes up. Like, obviously, those tools don't exist. Maybe they would exist. Maybe some people would like them.

• 1:07:15Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I've already seen people testing out the ChatGPT operator, having it drive their online dating profile. So I don't think this is science fiction. Now, whether it's good or not is a different question.

• 1:07:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, whether it's going to lead to the result you want, I think, is the question. And we're trying to get people out on dates with people that they're actually going to like.

• 1:07:34Casey Newton?

  Justin, I wonder if you could give a little bit of a pep talk to users of yours like Rachel, who are out there, they're using their AI prompts, they're not ghosting on their matches, they're showing up for these dates, it hasn't happened for them yet. What have you learned from your years in love and as the CEO of a dating app about what actually gets people across the finish line to find their person?

• 1:07:57Speaker 04

  For me, it was a shift in mentality. I think the biggest thing that I've learned about love and my biggest change from when I started Hinge back in 2011 to where I am today is the belief that there is the one or that you find the one versus that you create the one. And I think that a lot of us miss A1, maybe B1, because we have such a specific idea of like what this has to be and it's like we're shopping for the perfect person. And when I created Hinge the first time, it was like go through as many people as possible and as soon as you find the one, then everything just like works from there. And the interesting experience that I had when I got my one back, right? The one I dreamed about, I was like, oh, the one that got away from college.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  And then I flew over to Switzerland and she moved back and it was amazing for like two months. And then I was like, oh, oh my God, if I made a mistake, like there's flaws here. But we stuck with it, obviously, for 10 years now. And now we have just like amazing, deep, beautiful, incredible relationship. And I think that this mentality that you have to start building and creating the one and stop like searching for the one. For most of us, I think it's a messier journey and you choose someone and then you're like, okay, this is it, let's make this work together.

• 1:09:15Casey Newton?

  That's really beautiful. You know, I find myself asking the question, and I don't know that AI will ever be able to do this, but to me, a real question that I have, you know, when I was online dating was like, is this person like really looking for a relationship? Are they ready to be in a relationship? Like, do they know what that means? I don't think there's any way to figure that out aside from just going out with them and getting a sense of it. But yeah, I mean, I think the difference between like me now and me then is I am now dating somebody who like wants to be in a relationship and like knew that about himself. You gotta get there.

• 1:09:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a journey for everyone.

• 1:09:50Casey Newton?

  I don't know if you know, but Casey has a boyfriend. He's very handsome. He often brings it up. By often, I mean several times in an episode. It's a Valentine's Day episode. People want to hear about love.

• 1:10:02Kevin Roose?

  And we are thrilled for Casey.

• 1:10:04Casey Newton?

  It's an inspiring story.

• 1:10:05Kevin Roose?

  And his incredible boyfriend.

• 1:10:06Casey Newton?

  Thank you.

• 1:10:07Kevin Roose?

  They did meet on Tinder, so I don't know that you should congratulate them.

• 1:10:11Casey Newton?

  But, but I was on the edge. I was, I was ready to meet him anywhere.

• 1:10:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Casey Newton?

  And if I can just say one more thing, don't give up, people. You know, I was single. I went on so many online dates and I thought, this isn't working. And then I went on one more online date and it worked. And then I thought, online dating is fine. So that was my journey. You know, let me know what yours is in the comments. Uh, it's hard out there, but don't give up.

• 1:10:30Kevin Roose?

  And if Casey can find someone, you can too.

• 1:10:36Kevin Roose?

  Amen. All right. Thank you so much.

• 1:10:39Casey Newton?

  Thank you, Justin.

• 1:10:40Kevin Roose?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:11:08Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited this week by Rachel Drey and we're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemisto and Dan Powell. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Our audience editor is Mel Galogli. Video production by Sawyer Roque, Pat Gunther and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Hadad and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected] with what's on your dating profile.