“You should *not* go out with me if… you use AI.” A 25-year-old analyst found that Hinge profile within a few minutes of swiping in San Francisco, according to reporting by The Verge. In a city at the intellectual center of the AI boom, using the technology can be enough to rule out a match.
“Hinge has a prompt where you can say, ‘We’ll get along if.” Sometimes people will be like, ‘F*ck AI,’” the analyst told the outlet. Those profiles set a compatibility test that goes beyond whether someone works in tech: how they use AI, what they think it does to society, and whether they want it involved in a relationship at all.
One 21-year-old software engineer interviewed by The Verge puts AI directly in charge of finding dates. He said running a startup leaves him too busy to handle the process himself, so an AI agent controls his Hinge account. It mimics his texting style and behavior, automatically messages women, assesses whether someone is a good match, and adds a date to his calendar.
“If you are a founder, you have to put a value on your time, so you can’t be doing low-leverage activities. Protect your dopamine, folks,” he told the outlet. He claimed he goes on two dates a week and boasted that the setup had lowered his “CPN,” short for “cost per nut.” His approach turns dating into an efficiency calculation, precisely the kind of AI use those anti-AI profiles would exclude.
For another person The Verge interviewed, the concern is less about automating messages than whether there will be a future to share. The man, who works at an AI safety nonprofit, factors the possibility that AI might soon destroy the world into his thinking about relationships and having children. That’s his concern, not an established prediction.
“A lot of people are planning for what they want their life to look like five, 10, 15 years down the line,” he said. “For me, it’s hard to have that planning conversation because I don’t really expect a long-term future.”
He was unsure whether he would date someone who works in AI. “They don’t think very hard about the societal impacts of their actions because they’re mostly in it for the paycheck or because it’s interesting,” he added. His position complicates a simple split between tech insiders and outsiders: working on AI safety doesn’t mean being comfortable with other people’s priorities in the industry.
The friction isn’t confined to dating apps. According to KTVU’s reporting, several Bay Area cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond, have passed short-term moratoriums on data center construction over the past few months. Locals have also clashed with other intrusions of technology into daily life, including the proliferation of AI-generated food posters and self-driving robotaxis.
Because the engineer’s agent mimics his texting style, a message that sounds like him doesn’t establish that he wrote it. The voice is part of what he’s automated.
