Bumble founder and executive chair Whitney Wolfe Herd raised eyebrows this week with her comments about how AI might change the dating experience.
During an onstage interview, Bloomberg’s Emily Chang brought up bots posing as real people, or real people falling in love with bots, as examples of how AI might make online dating worse. Herd countered that Bumble’s goal is to use the technology to “help create more healthy and equitable relationships.”
For example, Herd said, in the “near future,” users could talk to an AI “dating concierge” about their insecurities, then the concierge could give them pointers on how to do better. And “if you want to get really out there,” Herd suggested there might even be a day when the concierge could help users find matches by going on dates with other concierges. If the bots have a good date, then their human counterparts get matched up, too.
The audience reacted with snickers, but Herd was undeterred: “No, no, truly. And then you don’t have to talk to 600 people. It will just scan all of San Francisco for you and say, ‘These are the three people you want to meet.’”