The incel-ification of dating apps: CEOs want to burn coal so “AI wingmen” can automate flirting

The scene: the state of dating apps seems broken by design

Before we descend into the circle of “AI agent” hell, let’s start in limbo — the general malaise the millions of dating app users seem to universally complain about. Case in point: When was the last time you talked with a friend over lunch who told you how much they loved using their dating apps? Precisely.

The problems are really obvious if you can read. If I were the CEO of Grindr, for instance, I would make sure I was spending several hours a week on Reddit reading the subreddit r/grindr. It would make my day job easy, as there’s a strategically ignored product roadmap clearly visible in the user complaints. It’s a conspiracy.

And for r/grindr Redditors, the library is always open. For instance, a title for a thread from the past week reads: “This app is unusable unless you're paying the premium subscription fees. Within 5 seconds of opening Grindr I’m faced with an unskippable 60 second ad.” Another thread questions whether it’s worth it to report so many spam accounts, as reporting spam takes several more taps than simply blocking the spammer? The implication in the question is that Grindr is not interested in addressing issues faced by free users, but is instead focused on extracting the maximum value from each user through upgrades to its paid features or through advertising.

This isn’t even a complaint-heavy week on the subreddit. One year ago, when Grindr rolled out its new messaging architecture, the app became almost unusable due to disappearing messages and instability — and the subreddit lit up. The reason Grindr can appear to its userbase like a careless and ineffective tech company may be the conflicting tensions of its business model. 

I may not be the CEO of Grindr, but I certainly have spent a lot of time in the past decade-plus on the app as both a user and a journalist — in those phases between closed relationships and in open relationships. Every time, I’ll invariably get so frustrated with the app that I am in a perpetual cycle of deleting and downloading again. I leave not because I struggle to connect with people. I’ve had friendships and relationships blossom from those chats. People message me. I sometimes message back. It does well enough as a facilitator of casual conversation that I find myself returning — and almost immediately exiting the app because of a horrible ad and unconsciously tapping back into the folder on my iPhone, where I’ve tucked the app out of sight.

Why keep redownloading it? Part of it, I’ll admit, is my frustration with all the other apps. For as hellish as Grindr feels, the other apps don’t seem that much better. At least on Grindr, the eros keeps people engaged in some shallow momentary banter. The art direction in people’s albums of nudes is entertaining. The rest of the dating app scene, queer and straight, feels equally dystopian and far less chatty. On Grindr, the majority of people probably aren’t searching for love, at least not at that moment. Its selling point is proximity — who’s online right now. That, for better or worse, makes it feels more like a game, more transactional; it’s a commodified form of digital cruising with a paywall. It may make you feel like shit, too. It often makes me feel inadequate and unwanted enough to the point that I delete it again. But it also has targeted an innate human desire — the desire to be desired — that I go back. The cycle repeats. 

I should know. I’ve interviewed executives at Grindr and at almost every other major app in the past decade — long-reads on the user experience of these apps everywhere from Vice to The Washington Post. I previously viewed my role as an accountability journalist who might motivate these platforms to get a touch less discriminatory, a hair more livable for marginalized folks on these platforms. I’ve kept asking the same questions. Little has changed. 

Certainly, enough queer people want to hook up that an app creating stable infrastructure for safely and securely facilitating the sharing of nudes and locations would theoretically be enough of a product roadmap, surely? Ironically, though, user privacy has rarely seemed like a priority for Grindr, which was sued last spring in the United Kingdom for allegedly sharing its users’ sensitive data — HIV statuses — with advertisers.

To a neutral observer, it might seem that the app like that would care mostly about scoring some PR wins, growing revenue, pleasing investors and little else.

For instance, it took George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a white police officer for Grindr to finally remove its “ethnicity filter” system in 2020, a decision its PR team widely promoted to the press but the app lagged on implementing. “It's like Grindr lied, just to jump on Black Lives Matter,” one user told the BBC, who reported in late June 2020 that there had been six updates to the app since the positive press for the decision at the start of that month; the filter was still live. It's since been removed, but the app had years to respond to Black users, academics and experts — as well as reporting from journalists.

Seven years ago, for this Vice feature, I asked all the major apps that then had ethnicity filters why. Most declined to comment or didn't respond. In an interview, I put a vice-president at Grindr on the spot. He dodged the question: “I think we as an industry and as a collaborative community have a lot of hard thinking to do around those kinds of opportunities to filter.” The answer seemed implied, then, as I wrote: "Eliminating filters entirely could actually cut into a revenue stream."

Clearly, complaints about dating apps are not new. Complaints about Grindr are as old as the app itself. In the past decade, headlines about the death of the apps have repeatedly appeared in the pages of every major outlet — even I reported for The Washington Post back in 2018 how Grindr was “falling out of favor” following controversies that included evergreen safety concerns and glitches, as well as the then-CEO of the app, a straight man, coming out against marriage equality. What a ride! In fact, that was a scoop first reported by Grindr’s own magazine, Into.

I recount these examples from my prior reporting not as a memoir but to underscore that even as executives change and user complaints persist, the underlying incentives to ignore users best interests has not fundamentally changed. I’m now skeptical that deeper reforms are possible due to both the business model incentives and the affordances of the platforms’ design. 

And as you can hear across r/grindr, social media broadly and any conversation at your local gay dive, there’s a widespread sense that things really have gotten even worse. Journalist Mathew Rodriguez, who previously worked as a staff writer at Into, recently spoke to frustrated users and experts in an excellent feature for Them about how “Grindr’s dip in quality is part of a larger trend.”

Rodriguez writes: “Of course, people had always been exasperated with Grindr. But most of the tension people felt relative to the app was due to human-on-human friction: the racism, sizeism, serophobia — and more — that people experienced in their one-on-one interactions with other people. What has subsumed this type of interaction was a wholly different beast,” he said of the ads, the spam, the feature bloat. “This new grating reality was not due to interacting with other humans, but due mostly to ads, as if a billboard were cockblocking you at the local watering hole.”

If you’ve reached a certain point of market, well, penetration, then the next obvious move is to make the freemium experience ever slightly more painful until you’re convinced to upgrade. When that’s showing diminishing returns, you need other flashy ways to impress investors, who have also grown dissatisfied with the apps. Rodriguez’s reporting suggested that might be the motive for the next-big-thing, now-with-”AI” feature bloat of what Grindr’s CEO is actually focused on. “All of these new features, though touted by the company itself as ways to foster connection, might be ways to calm investor unease.” 

The contestants: the drag of dating app CEOs selling you on the “AI” hype

Give us a twirl! Let’s see how this dress hugs those glorious curves. Oh! OK, where do we start? The current era of “AI” hype suggests the future of dating apps is only accelerating the widening of the already rather loose gap between user problems and gimmicky features. The gimmicks are a distraction. They might even be novel and fun to play around with. But they don’t change the underlying issues. And, importantly, they allow the apps to charge more from their user base. 

It’s the same playbook we see in the productivity software space, with “AI” chatbot features added to Microsoft and Google suites where users were not asking for them — and then users are getting charged more as a result. 

I saw the proverbial canary pop into my DMs on January 21, as every other Grindr user did. The company slid into its users’ inboxes with a link to its 2025 “powered by AI” product roadmap. It felt about as welcome as an unsolicited dick pic: Yes, they're adding “AI” features to “enhance” your dating life. The message arrived with all the finesse of a 2 a.m. “u up?” text and all the substance of a ghost leaving your album on read. 

In my reporting on dating apps in the past decade, I’ve kept returning to one thorny question: Are these apps failing because of predatory design and profit motives, or are people just generally awful? The answer, like most matches on these platforms, is complicated. Despite the complaints, Grindr users have continued putting up with its hellish ads for, say, mobile games that have a king mascot, who is not the Burger King but still makes me think of a Whopper every time I see him. Why do we put up with the Grindr ads for the king who isn’t the Burger King? What a whopper! Because if you’re horny in a big enough city, you’ll find somebody hot online within a few thousand feet radius. That's not the issue. 

The problem is that dating apps broadly promise connections while deploying features that seem precision-engineered to make genuine connection harder. 

Last summer, I wrote a feature for Condé Nast Traveler about how dating apps are launching lots of dedicated travel features. Some of them are, in fact, useful to connect with people while you’re traveling. As much as they’re hated, if you’re lonely, the apps serve some functional purpose — such as meeting a hot guy on one of my trips to Paris. We laid on the floor of his apartment, where he cupped a hand over my chest, listened to my elevated pulse and whispered, “Shh, I just want to remember your heartbeat.”

But Paris guy is a rarity. I noticed in my solo travels that an overreliance on the apps was more often driving up my screen time and keeping me from, well, more “meaningful connections.”

I wrote last year: “These days, complaints about the apps feel as common as small talk about the weather. This past Valentine’s Day, six users in the United States filed a class-action lawsuit against Match Group, the parent company of many popular dating apps, including Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid,” I had reported for Traveler. “The lawsuit accuses the app giant of a ‘predatory’ business model, with ‘addictive, game-like design features, which lock users into a perpetual pay-to-play loop.’ In a statement to news outlets at the time, Match Group responded: ‘The lawsuit is ridiculous and has zero merit.’ But while most travelers aren’t taking the apps to court, the lawsuit’s critiques echo the negative perceptions of many users, who complain about it on TikTok or at brunch with their best friends.”

Sound familiar? Grindr isn't the only one with a gown in this show — all the other apps get similar complaints, even if they vary in how insufferable their functionality is. They all share fundamental flaws. By design. So, of course, rather than addressing these fundamental issues, some powerful people in the industry now promise automated pickup lines and icebreakers might help fix what they have, in fact, broken.

And yet, there’s a darker pattern here: Dating apps are taking their already questionable track record of algorithmically mediating human connection and somehow making it worse — by suggesting that you could outsource your personality to large language models (or LLMs). 

The category is: “AI” chatbot but make it gay!

There are many ways to meet people IRL. I’ve tried many of them including queer events, poetry readings, and trying to look cute and approachable while reading Ocean Vuong or Eileen Myles books at queer-centric cafes on Saturday afternoons. I’ve had some dates happen. I even went on a Guardian Blind Date. 

When you delete the dating apps, you quickly realize how much dating apps have affected offline culture. I enjoy flirting even if I’m a writerly introvert. But it feels for a lot of people like we’ve been losing some of these skills. Every time I go to a queer bar, it seems like half the guys in the room have Grindr open on their phones, ignoring the immediately available venue of humans around them. I, too, read The Atlantic feature about the people who quit dating, with the summary of the article reading “being single can be hard — but the search for love may be harder.” 

Obviously, the queer apps serve specific needs and anxieties that the straight apps don’t always meet: their core premise is connecting people who historically have dated and built community in different ways than the dominant heteropatriarchal culture. And yet, why does it feel like the apps have made us less social, less likely to approach strangers, arguably worse at dating? 

That’s what makes the “AI” intrusion of Grindr’s 2025 product roadmap feel like such a betrayal of its core mission. The roadmap reads like a tech bro’s fever dream: LLM-powered “Chat Summaries” to refresh your memory about who sent which nudes, an “Explore Heatmap” to find “the world’s liveliest gayborhoods,” and a Hinge Standouts-like feature called “For You” that promises “less time scrolling and more time making meaningful connections.” 

But the crown jewel of this algorithmic makeover wasn’t even announced in this roadmap. Announced in 2024, it is the much hyped “Wingman,” which Grindr boldly claims will be “the dating world’s first AI ‘Wingman.’” Grindr CEO George Arison told The Wall Street Journal in October that by 2027, your “AI wingman” could chat with other users’ “AI wingmen,” screening potential dates before you waste time talking to actual humans. Because nothing says “meaningful connection” like having two language models simulate gay flirtation.

Arison told the Journal that the company struck a deal with “AI” model maker Ex-human to essentially clone their straight romantic conversation model and — in his words — “make it more gay.” How does one make an “AI wingman” appropriately queer? By training it on Grindr user’s chat data and queer slang, apparently. What could go wrong?

If you’re straight and read this far, you might think, well, this doesn’t have anything to do with me, does it? Oh, darling. Let me hold you. Firstly, girls, many of your boyfriends have messaged me on Grindr in the small hours of the morning, so it’s equally an app for a few of your fellow “straights.” Secondly, innovations in online dating, from the early dating websites to geolocation based mobile apps, have historically flowed from queer platforms into the mainstream. Grindr helped pioneer location-based dating when it launched in 2009, three years before Tinder made the woes of hookup culture the trending topic of many personal essays among straight girls (and, well, I wrote more than a few cringe essays, too).

If Grindr’s experiment with “AI wingmen” proves profitable, you can bet straight dating apps will follow suit — and in fact, many are already hyping the “AI agent” future. As I reported for Condé Nast Traveler in August: “These platforms are likely to continue evolving in ways that users find irritating, with many already getting swept up in the latest ‘AI’ hype. The founder of Bumble said earlier this year that users might one day get ‘AI’-powered dating bots that could screen potential partners, which already sounds like more fodder for disgruntled daters online and offline.” 

And so far, the response from actual Grindr users has been about as warm as a blocked profile. “Am I alone in thinking that Grindr is the last app on earth which I’d want AI summaries, matching and curation for?” wrote Reddit user NormieMcNormalface. “The core functionality of the app is broken, focus on fixing that before lumping on things no one asked for.”

Another user, McMunnies, offered a devastatingly accurate prediction of how “AI” chat summaries might read: “They’ve invited you to their house since their wife isn’t home. You’ve sent them your album and face pics and they’ve responded with a blurry torso. Interested in talking about having a DL hookup at some point that will never happen.”

The kicker? Arison suggests the “AI wingman” could help address “loneliness and depression” in the queer community — by giving users a bot to “openly discuss their feelings.” It’s a strangely infantilizing vision that assumes queers need an “AI” chaperone to navigate their love lives, delivered by a company that seems increasingly disconnected from its users’ actual needs, anyway. 

The problem of queer loneliness is real. The culpability of apps in making us lonelier is an open research question. But the solution for exploring your sexuality already exists: queer and trans community, making eyes with that guy across the bar, making out partly clothed behind some hedges off a side street. In other words, the best way to explore your queer sexuality is to make out with another queer, not chatting to an “AI wingman.”

The questions and answers round: why do I want to talk to a chatbot about fisting when I could talk to a power bottom?

If you’re a drag girl at a good ol’ drag pageant, then you best be prepared to answer some questions about why you should win. Heck, any beauty queen is expected to answer some big and hard ones as a part of the whole experience — especially if their ambitions touch almost every gay’s phone on the planet. But the “AI”-pushing gay bros don’t have a lot in the way of answers. 

First, let’s establish what we mean by “AI” in dating apps, because there’s a crucial distinction between the algorithms that have been matching potential lovers for years and the new wave of LLMs being thrust into our dating lives. And the app CEOs aren’t taking care to clarify what they mean.

Apps like Hinge and Tinder have long used recommendation algorithms — think Netflix-style “if you liked this, you might like that” systems — to suggest potential matches. These aren’t particularly sophisticated. Nor are they without their own problems. But they are scoped technologies in that they are designed and trained to address particular objectives — some blend of keeping users happy but not too happy so they upgrade to paid. For apps like Tinder and Hinge, their proprietary algorithms remain black boxes, but they have got the job done well enough to keep some percentage of paying users engaged in their platforms. Grindr, notably, has mostly stayed away from algorithmic matching, instead simply showing you who’s nearby. But its newly announced “For You” match feature suggests it’s entering this arena for the first time. 

While Grindr has suggested that futuristic “AI” dating agents could negotiate hookups on your behalf by 2027, the current reality is far more modest. In testing, Wired writer Reece Rogers described Grindr’s new Wingman chatbot as an expected LLM tuned for LGBTQ+ audiences — though notably more DTF than its mainstream “AI”cousins: “Unlike the more prudish outputs from OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, Grindr’s AI wingman was willing to be direct,” Rogers wrote in a recent hands-on product preview. “I asked it to share fisting tips for beginners, and after stating that fisting is not for newcomers, the AI wingman encouraged me to start slow, use tons of lube, explore smaller toys first, and always have a safe word ready to go. ‘Most importantly, do your research and maybe chat with experienced folks in the community,’ the bot said. ChatGPT flagged similar questions as going against its guidelines, and Claude refused to even broach the subject.” 

In that way, Grindr’s Wingman is a notable departure from other LLM products’ squeamishness around sexuality, but still a far cry from the autonomous dating agent Grindr promises is inevitably on the horizon. And we should question that narrative of inevitability. 

In my mind, it raises questions that Emily Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington, has been pushing us to ask about any system that automates human interaction. In October 2023, Bender provided this lucid and concise testimony to the United States House Committee on Science, Space and Technology about how we frame conversations around “AI.” 

Bender, who you should know coined the absolute zinger “stochastic parrots” in a banging paper explaining the risks of LLMs, writes: “This technological sector is presently the site of enormous influxes of capital and enormous concentrations of power.” She suggests we should instead ask questions about what’s happening with all this automation. We should resist analysis that says what “the AI is replacing” and instead talk about the people doing the automation. In this era of “AI” hype, part of the job of resisting is insisting on a clear subject-verb relationship, where “AI” isn’t the noun.

Look, I imagine Bender has far more important things to think about than hookup apps, but the questions she advises we ask are the ones I’d want to ask these busted queens, by which I mean dating apps CEOs: “What is being automated? Who is automating it and why? Who benefits from that automation?  How well does the automation work in its use case that we’re considering? Who is being harmed and what recourse do they need? Who has accountability for the functioning of the automated system? What existing regulations already apply to the activities where the automation is being used?” 

Applied to dating apps, these questions reveal uncomfortable truths:

What’s being automated? The vision they sell is not just matching being automated, but the actual work of human connection — from crafting messages to screening potential dates.

Who benefits? Primarily the companies selling premium features and collecting more user data. 

Who might be harmed? Users who have their intimate conversations analyzed likely without clear and informed consent, and potentially those who come to rely on automated systems for emotional connection. 

“Grindr is currently revising its terms of service to ask people explicitly if the company can train its AI models on their personal data, which could include direct messages,” Zoë Schiffer reported in the newsletter Platformer last March. “Building a good AI boyfriend has proven to be tricky,” Schiffer wrote then. “In internal testing, the bot has at times offered racist opinions.” (Who could’ve imagined that?)

Are users being consulted? If the Reddit responses are any indication, absolutely not. Rather, dating apps like Grindr are seeking new revenue streams rather than addressing the problems users have been posting about for years. Adding “AI” features creates new premium tiers to sell — whether users benefit or not.

View from the proverbial catwalk: the incel-ification of dating apps

Let’s be clear about what we’re actually looking at: tech CEOs want to sell us chatbots to flirt for us because we’re allegedly too scared to say “hi” ourselves? Baby, if you can’t even type out a “wyd,” then maybe dating isn’t your ministry? If you can’t even muster the energy to type out your own messages, what are you bringing to the table? A low battery and a bad attitude? 

What we’re witnessing isn’t just feature bloat — it’s a lazy sales pitch for automating human connection itself, marketed as a solution to the loneliness it seems designed to deepen. 

After years of covering dating apps, I’ve never seen a more perfect example of tech creating new problems while claiming to solve existing ones. These aren’t just harmless features for people who need help breaking the ice. They're selling us on cognitive offloading — outsourcing human skills like flirting, banter and the semblance of emotional intelligence to LLMs that consume massive amounts of energy just to simulate personality.

The dark irony is palpable. At a moment when headlines scream about epidemic levels of loneliness, dating apps are offering an even more tech-mediated way to avoid genuine human interaction. Instead of learning how to navigate awkward first conversations or develop actual game, users are invited to let “AI” handle the messy work of being human. But even if that works for daters, who wants that?

It feels like tech designed for terminal social awkwardness — features built for people who've never learned to say more than “hey” before dropping a dozen hole pics. But rather than helping users develop real social skills, these tools risk creating learned helplessness. Why fumble through genuine connection when an “AI” promises to craft the perfect opening line?

The result? Dating apps that promise to make connection more human by making it fundamentally less human. It’s a perfect distillation of tech’s tendency to “solve” social problems by adding another layer of algorithmic mediation — as if what lonely people really need is more distance from authentic human contact.

It seems designed by guys who never wanted to learn how to talk to the objects of their desire — which, let’s be honest, is giving strong incel energy. Well, we are not their objects. We are so much more than that. We deserve more than that.

These features feel designed for people who’d rather optimize their way around the messy work of genuine human interaction, for which there is no shortcut. It’s tech designed by those who’ve convinced themselves that their problem isn’t a lack of social skills but rather insufficient algorithmic optimization.

The gag on Grindr is, even the guy who can’t manage more than “wuu2” and a torso pic can eventually get what he’s looking for. Adding “AI” to the mix won’t make him, or anyone else for that matter, more dateable.

The judgement: quite literally burning coal on a warming planet to automate flirting

The environmental cost of training these models adds another layer of absurdity. It's quite literally burning coal to sell us on a vision for the future where you don't have to know how to flirt. That is, until you actually show up at the bar.

The queer community doesn’t need “AI” in dating apps — we need to log off.

We need something far more radical and far more ancient: community in the real world, more spaces where we can mingle and meet and, yes, cruise. After years of covering dating apps’ attempts to “solve” human connection, I’m realizing how the whole framework is broken. We’re so caught up in individualistic, tech-mediated solutions that we’ve forgotten what actually makes queer spaces vibrant: physical infrastructure, communal gathering spots and yes, even old-school cruising grounds.

Here’s the thing about queer and trans liberation that seems particularly relevant now: It wasn’t just about changing laws or shifting public opinion. While the straights were building nuclear families behind white picket fences, we were creating chosen families in urban enclaves. While mainstream society pushed isolation, we built mutual aid networks and community spaces. The solution was never to adopt the relationship paradigms of those who wanted to erase us — it was to build something altogether different.

The gayborhood wasn’t in our pockets; we were in the gayborhood. We’ve lost the importance of that distinction and we’re paying the cost. 

The bitter irony is that Grindr positioning itself as the “Global Gayborhood in Your Pocket™” comes at a time when actual gayborhoods are being displaced by gentrification.  Now they want to add energy-intensive “AI” features to further mediate connections that historically thrived on direct, unmediated contact? 

The scores: *deletes all apps … again*

In every Hype Ball, we assign numerical scores out of 10 for three key criteria, to score the object of our attention. 

Hotness score:  1/10. 

While I don’t want to chat to any chatbot about queer sex, Grindr deserves some credit for the fisting anecdotes. I enjoyed reading about fisting in Wired. That earns a one for the entertainment factor. But let me be clear: There’s nothing sexy about having an “AI” write your sexts. What’s next? ChatGPT writing your wedding vows? (Well, turns out somebody has a custom GPT for you.) The only thing less arousing than automated flirting is knowing your intimate conversations are being used to train the sexbots. 

Gravity score: 0/10. 

How far off of our home planet is the hype? Ten equals very aligned with the reality of gravity on our home planet. Zero equals a hookup app for a fictional Mars colony. And let’s be clear: who on Earth wants these features? The incel energy is inceling. But even if nobody asks for them, the potential for harm is real. When the leading queer dating app starts pushing “AI” features like these it signals a broader shift toward automated intimacy that could reshape dating culture far beyond our community. 

Style score: 0/10. 

The technical equivalent of a Hugo Boss T-shirt and skinny jeans to a rave. The bouncer might turn you away unless he wants to fuck you and has questionable standards. Not only is no one asking for this, the whole platform seems like its sinking further into spam. Opening Grindr now feels like accidentally clicking a Daily Mail link. As Matthew Rodriguez wrote for Them this past week, simply tap the app and you’re locked into an animated ad: “Often, the ad is for an indistinct mobile game featuring a woman with a freezing baby who must choose between spending her fifty gold coins on either building a working fireplace or repairing a broken window that’s letting in an icy breeze. They last over 30 seconds and are unskippable, making for an unpleasant user experience.” 

Overall Hype Ball score: 0.03/10. 

Download Grindr and you might get the clap. But this promised “AI wingman” won’t give you the rizz. When even the guys who can’t manage more than “wyd” are getting what they want without algorithmic assistance, you have to question who these features are really for.

Anxiety Meter: 6.66/10. 

How anxious should we feel? There are good reasons to be concerned. But I’m also bored. Hence, it’s hard for me to get my anxiety any harder than a six out of ten for this closing score. While Grindr users can probably survive another questionable feature rollout, the broader promise of cognitive offloading should alarm anyone who cares about genuine human connection. When tech companies start “solving” loneliness by making human interaction more tech-mediated with “AI,” we should check their track records on those problems. 

We should also question the narrative of inevitability, which is a classic part of the Silicon Valley hype playbook. As I often say, when someone tells you something is “the future,” you need to ask, whose future are they really talking about? Who does that future serve? And is that a future we even want? Saying something is inevitable doesn’t make it so.

At the same time, we can’t simply dismiss this as mere hype and move on. This isn’t a trivial matter — dating apps house sensitive user data. Dating apps are exploited by scammers and spammers and, yes, sometimes stalkers. There are legitimate safety concerns embedded in the hype. Even seemingly innocuous chatbot products can have fatal consequences. In October, for instance, a mother in Florida filed a lawsuit against Character.AI, alleging one of its chatbots had pushed her 14-year-old teen son to commit suicide. 

Am I saying dating apps are the root of all evil? Please. I’ve found friends, benefits, even love a few times on these apps and so have countless others. But the apps have also left many people harmed, frustrated and with a drained battery. And to be honest, I don’t always like how the app nudges even the best of us to behave. 

After reporting now and again on the apps’ problems over the years, it’s clear to me now the solution cannot be mere tweaks to the user experience.  The issue isn’t just about making the mainstream apps better — it’s about examining the techno-optimistic ideology that convinced us every human problem needs a startup solution. 

We’re currently living in the hangover of 2010s techno-utopianism, and the hair of the dog isn’t more technology — especially not “AI” features nobody asked for being thrust non-consensually into our dating lives. The way forward isn’t necessarily backward, but maybe we could learn something from what we’ve lost in our rush to optimize every aspect of human connection.

Like newspaper personal ads before them, I suspect some kind of “dating app” will probably play a role in our future love lives. That doesn’t need to be all bad. But the question we should be asking ourselves is what we want these platforms to do? We need to think bigger than merely deleting Grindr and logging into Scruff or Sniffies. We need to broaden the scope of our imaginations. But, of course, dick brain will be dick brain. Thankfully, we don’t need to sound like a philosopher to imagine what alternatives could look like. We will, however, need to log off. At least for some of the time. 

These days, it sometimes feels like rave culture is one of the few spaces in queer life where the rare spirit of collective joy and unmediated connection still thrives. Maybe that’s a sign. While tech bros are busy training “AI” models to simulate gay personality, actual queers are finding each other the same way we always have — by creating spaces where we can be authentically, messily, gloriously human. We simply need more of them — especially sober spaces for connection, more accessible spaces for connection, more trans-, nonbinary-affirming spaces for connection. And only we, the people, can make the kind we really need.

In other news, while I deleted Grindr at the start of this drag contest, I’ve yet again redownloaded the app while sitting here bored at the lonely judges table. I’ve tapped the icon. Within seconds, like clockwork, the video mobile game ad overtakes my screen as I tap to open a message. This time, it was not the ad for the mobile game with the king who is not the Burger King. I rapidly swipe up out of habit, close the app and open it again. I tap the message. I have a moment to read it before another ad inevitably forces me to exit the app again. The message reads: “hey, what’s up.” I reply: “Not much, wbu?”

Therefore, if you’re hot and like books and see me reading around in the queer-centered cafes of East London, feel free to start an IRL conversation. Feel free to flirt. Feel free to look longingly with me at the author photo of Ocean Vunong.

While I want to challenge your creativity — maybe ask me about what I’m reading — a simple “hey, what’s up” will also do the trick. We might have been overcomplicating all of this love stuff.