My AI Matchmaker Let Me Down

In the Instagram video, a knockoff JFK Jr. towers over a beautiful woman with a raspy voice. “Are you single?” the woman asks. He smirks into the camera. “I am.” I had no choice: I clicked on the account, only to discover an endless stream of gorgeous single men looking for love. They were movie stars compared with the men I’d seen on dating apps. Where the hell was this woman finding these guys? And could I come? The man-in-the-street interviews had been filmed by Amata, one of a handful of new AI matchmaking companies that present themselves as the future of online dating. Instead of scrolling through thousands of options, users are presented with potential matches one at a time. Instead of paying to use the app, you can choose to pay only to set up a date. (Amata charges $20 a date.) There’s less chatting: On Amata, the communication window opens only two hours before a scheduled meeting, saving the getting-to-know-yous for the actual date. One woman who uses Amata told me she liked the mystery of this; the dates feel more like old-fashioned setups. And the apps attempt to limit ghosting—they don’t refund the fee if you back out of a date. But public trust in artificial intelligence in general is declining, even as the technology becomes woven into daily life. Searching for love is one of the most quintessentially human experiences. Will people really be willing to hand that search over to AI, along with information about their most intimate preferences and desires? Maybe—if they’re desperate enough. Last summer, a Forbes Health survey found that 78 percent of all dating-app users say they’re burned-out. Swiping through profiles isn’t romantic; at best, it’s a chore, and at worst, it’s a compulsion. Dating-app companies are especially worried about Gen Z. Young people who grew up online seem uninterested in finding love there. But the industry, which made $6 billion last year off the hopes of would-be lovers, isn’t about to give up on this market. Companies are betting that they can sell AI as an online-dating time-saver, and that people who are already depending on an algorithm to find love won’t be too spooked by this new technology. According to Ludovic Huraux, a co-CEO of Amata, “The future is AI matchmaking.” [Annie Joy Williams: Canceled by Hinge] Sitch, one of the first successful AI matchmaking apps, launched in 2024. One of its founders, Nandini Mullaji, told me that she’s always had a knack for setting people up. It runs in her family: Her grandmother is a matchmaker in India. But hiring a human matchmaker in the United States typically costs at least $5,000, Mullaji said. Sitch aims to provide a similar service—the ability to “really understand what your values, your preferences (both stated and not stated) are” and to find someone who suits you—for far less money. Amata’s AI, Huraux told me, “learns about you, about your preferences; it curates profiles; it organizes the dates; it debriefs the dates.” In December, Justin McLeod, who founded the popular app Hinge, announced that he would be leaving the company to start his own AI matchmaking app, called Overtone. The traditional apps have already quietly incorporated AI into their existing platforms. Hinge users can sit back and let AI draft messages to their matches. And Bumble is rolling out an AI dating assistant called “Bee.” As one of the many burned-out daters, I was tempted by the idea of a matchmaker, though the truth is that I mostly wanted to meet that tall man in the video. So I signed up for Amata to give it a shot. My best friend, Michael, agreed to try Amata too. His AI matchmaker asked him at least an hour’s worth of questions about his past relationships, what he aspired to achieve in his career, what he was looking for in a partner, and his dating goals. Mine asked me far fewer questions: my height, my job title, my religion, one quality I was looking for in a man, and whether I was open to having children one day. Simple: 5 foot 7, journalist, Christian, wit, and probably. The back-and-forth lasted about two minutes. After that, the process was relatively straightforward. My matchmaker avatar—a smiling red-haired woman—sent a few photos of a man that the AI had determined I might be interested in, with a paragraph describing the man’s dreams, how he spends his days, and what he’s looking for in a partner. My first thought was that my matchmaker didn’t know half as many of those details about me. What was it telling these men anyway? The answer seemed to be that I would join a nunnery if I weren’t so determined to repopulate the world with babies. The men the app presented to me were heavily involved in their churches, volunteering multiple times a week. “He meets your must-have requirement of being a Christian,” the app kept telling me. Clearly, my matchmaker had misunderstood. I tried correcting it: “Actually, I said having a partner of the same faith would be nice, but I said it wasn’t a must-have.” I tried to explain that I am a Christian, but I’m not that kind of Christian. (Think: less pastor’s wife, more raised by a Southern Baptist family that prays before dinner.) But my matchmaker wasn’t having it. “I know you are a Christian. How do you practice your faith?” I felt like I was being interrogated by my mother. One of the benefits of AI matchmaking was supposed to be that it could help users get around their own biases—the expectations that hold them back from meeting people who might actually be the right fit for them. Many people, Huraux told me, have the “wrong criteria in their mind”: a strict height or age range that might make them miss a good match. But I didn’t suddenly become less shallow on Amata. My matchmaker showed me some men who sounded like they might suit me, but seeing them only two-dimensionally, I still found myself saying no before I could even finish reading the blurb. I wasn’t the only one for whom the app malfunctioned. Allison Green, a 25-year-old woman living in New York, started using Amata after quitting Hinge. “I like it because it takes out the small talk,” she told me in January. But that was before she went on her first date. When I asked how it went, she said that the app had made a big mistake. Unlike me, she actually had told the matchmaker that she had a religious requirement: She wanted to date someone Jewish. And her date wasn’t Jewish. She and the guy laughed it off, and set each other up with more suitable friends of theirs. “I don’t know if I trust Amata, though,” she told me. She kept feeling that the descriptions of the men weren’t accurate, and stopped using Amata a few weeks later. Whereas a human matchmaker knows if a client is lying about his height, and can at least guess if he’s lying about his personality, an AI matchmaker probably can’t (at least not yet). Much like traditional dating apps, AI matchmakers have to trust their users to be honest. For my part, I now knew that the men in the Instagram videos who had drawn me to Amata were in a different category than the men my AI matchmaker thought I deserved. But I was having a hard time explaining that I wasn’t interested in the options it was offering me because they weren’t particularly … attractive. I asked Michael how he was navigating this. “Oh, I lost all political correctness within the first five minutes,” he said. He simply asked the AI, “Can you show me hotter people?” Meanwhile, I was replying “No, thank you!” like I might hurt its feelings. Amata tries to discourage last-minute cancellations by requiring users to send apology notes. But three of the six men Michael was scheduled to meet called the dates off anyway. One match sent him a terse “Sorry shifting priorities!” the morning of. But another guy was much more decent. He explained that he couldn’t make the date they had planned because he had gotten last-minute tickets to a Lady Gaga concert—but would Michael like to come to that instead? Michael didn’t feel a romantic connection, but at least…