Way back in the mists of time, your correspondent was once tasked with the role of ambassador and plenipotentiary in a romantic matter of some importance.
A 13-year-old schoolmate – whose blushes shall be spared by renaming him “James” – was rather taken with a girl this piece will refer to as “Jessica”. In those days, in Ireland, the standard courtship ritual for teenagers of that age was for the relationship to be negotiated among trusted friends. And thus, your ambassador was dispatched to open negotiations with a girl he barely knew – Jessica’s best friend – in order to conclude the terms of a relationship agreement between the pair. Negotiations being successful, the relationship was later sealed by an awkward holding of hands in the cinema, during a screening of the 1998 blockbuster Armageddon arranged by this writer and his co-negotiator. The happy – but alas short-lived – couple had not so much as exchanged a word with each other until that point.
This tale of diplomatic triumph, of course, involved early-stage teenagers, where some awkwardness in the matter of dating and relationships is to be expected and to be viewed almost fondly. Many people now in their forties might relate to such experiences. However, it was normally expected that by the time a person reached their late teens, the need for third parties to negotiate their dates would have come to an end. Until now, anyway.
Can’t Think of an Opener? AI Is Here to Help
The founder of Hinge – one of the most popular dating apps in the English-speaking world – this week defended a very telling decision by the company. Now, rather than the obligation being on individual users to contact people they might find interesting once they have “matched” on the app, all parties will have the option to use artificial intelligence to negotiate the terms of a date with their intended. The AI will analyze their own profile as well as that of the person in whom they have taken an interest and craft an appropriately flirty opening line. The other person will also have the option to use AI to craft a response, and so on. This raises the very real specter that at least some number of adult relationships will form between people whose only knowledge of each other is the sparkling repartee generated by an AI engine.
Why is this happening? Some quotes from Hinge founder Jackie Jantos this week are terrifying.
She told the BBC that members of Generation Z are spending, on average, 1,000 fewer hours per year – that is two hours fewer per day – in the company of other human beings compared to previous generations. She said that this equates to “two hours per day extra spent not in the company of another human, but most likely going deep in some sort of experience engaged in your phone”.
Meanwhile an Oxfam survey released last year revealed that almost half – 47% – of Generation Z self-report as lonely and short of human contact. Which raises the question: is it possible that these people have simply forgotten, or worse, never learned, how to talk to another person?
The Polarized Battle of the Sexes
Then of course there is the other element: the growing polarization of the sexes along political and cultural lines. In Germany, for example, the plurality of young men voted at the last federal elections for the AfD. Meanwhile, a third of young women cast their ballots for Die Linke, the most radically left-wing of all Germany’s national parties. The same pattern repeats in many Western democracies, with young men and young women apparently fleeing toward opposite extremes of the political spectrum while communicating with each other less and less.
This pattern of political and social disengagement is reflected in raw data: several high-quality national and youth datasets show declining sexual frequency, rising sexual inactivity or weaker partnership formation in parts of Europe. These include the Natsal data from the UK, the 2023 IFOP/Lelo study in France and the WHO Europe/HBSC adolescent sexual health report – all of which show dramatic falls in the number of young people reporting regular sex, happy relationships or general happiness with anything associated with their romantic lives. On top of that, we might add the general fall in fertility which Statement and many other outlets have covered.
Is AI Anything New, or Just Arranged Marriage Reborn?
So, in this context, is it wrong to scoff at AI being used to help young people – who very clearly require all the assistance they can get? After all, if artificial intelligence can give polarized young people the confidence to actually leave their homes and meet people with whom they are at least interested in pursuing a relationship, is that not a good thing? Perhaps it sounds so alien to older generations because we did not need it. But then the advances in dating practices that those generations experienced might have seemed equally alien to their forebears. For example, people living in the 1920s and 1930s might well have been bemused by the concept of speed dating.
From one point of view, the use of AI to bring people together is simply a modern reinterpretation of the centuries-old traditions of arranged marriage or matchmaking, in which experienced elders – who perhaps do not care enough in the modern world – solved these problems for the next generation by pairing them up with somebody suitable.
George III of the United Kingdom, for example, met his German wife Queen Charlotte mere hours before their wedding in 1761 and went on to have a famously happy marriage underpinned by a shared love of music and books. When the couple were not reading or listening, they found the time to produce 15 children. So perhaps the idea of a computer matching two people up is not as alien as we might think.
The broader problem might well be outside the dating and romantic world: a universe in which young people are struggling to sell themselves or communicate the most attractive sides of their characters and personalities, is a world in which they will not only be limited in dating and romance. It is also a world in which they will be limited in their careers. Perhaps this is more terrifying given that, as so many commentators fear, it is AI with whom they will be competing for jobs.
As for the older generation that looks with skepticism on these developments, perhaps they too have questions to answer. Who is it, after all, who produced these young people? And educated them? And allowed this situation to develop? And, as the decades pass, will the plight of today’s youth be seen in time as their fault or the fault of the generation that allowed them to rot away for hours at a time in their bedrooms, gazing into phones and shorn of human contact?