Can Artificial Intelligence Predict the Right Partner for You?

The useful part

Finding love is big business (a multi-billion–dollar industry), and artificial intelligence is transforming that business. The promise of AI is to go deeper and end the days of endless swiping and unreturned messages. Now people can talk to AI about their hopes, dreams, and ideal partner preferences and AI can scan the pool of dating app users to find candidates who fit those criteria exactly.

How it works

• One of the first AI dating apps, Fate, uses "similarity and reciprocity of personality," according to an interview with the founder.
• Dating apps are increasingly outsourcing user matching to AI.
• Sure, we know some of the factors that generally predict liking—physical attractiveness, positive personality traits, similarity, familiarity, reciprocity—but we have yet to predict with the kind of...
• AI can also track behavior in the app to learn what people really want (something behavioral scientists call revealed preferences).
• As a relationship scientist, I see both peril and promise in this new generation of dating apps.

What to take from it

So if a robust science of compatibility doesn't exist yet, what is the AI matching based on?

Example or evidence

• Despite long-heralded promises by dating app companies that their apps are based on relationship science, the truth is that there is no strong foundation of science upon which to build these matching...