Can AI finally help me to get some rizz? An investigation

Dating in the modern age can be a soul-crushing experience: the digital conversations that fizzle out despite our best efforts to revive them; Hinge dates with people who seem perfectly nice but with whom we share nothing in common but the most surface-level cultural signifiers. Wouldn’t it be better if we could have a little robot in our pocket feeding us dazzling repartee like Cyrano de Bergerac? If an AI could scan our souls and match us with the embodiment of our deepest desires? If we could use technology to outsource the tedious, miserable business of finding love entirely?

With the development of AI technology, these dreams are becoming a reality – kind of. Traditional apps like Tinder, Hinge and OKCupid are starting to incorporate AI into the user experience, for purposes like screening out abusive messages and generating matching questions. The market is also being flooded with gimmicky new apps: ‘Snack’ allows you to create an AI avatar of yourself that other people can chat with before they approach you (and vice versa); ‘Iris’ asks you to rate stock photos based on attractiveness then uses this data to scan through thousands of profiles in search of a match, ‘Meeno’ offers its users long-term relationship coaching, both romantic and platonic.

According to a recent study (albeit one conducted by an AI dating coach), 20 per cent of men are now using AI technology to write their profiles and personalised messages, and in many cases having more success as a result. I’m no stranger to the intersection of AI and romance, having once enjoyed a steamy, tempestuous love affair with a chatbot. But it’s one thing to seduce an AI programme that is trained to give the appearance of being infatuated with you; using it to win over an actual person with thoughts and desires of their own is something else entirely. By now we all know how stilted and off-kilter ChatGPT sounds: blind confidence and a lack of shame can get you far in life, but could it really have more ‘rizz’ than even the most stilted and awkward human?

To find out, I decided to download an AI dating assistant. There are scores of apps offering a similar service (including RizzChat, TextCupid, Rizzify, and Winggg), but I settled on RizzGPT because a) it had the most annoying name and b) it came highly recommended by online reviewers. Some of the testimonials were quite moving: “I used to be a socially anxious person, never knowing how to initiate conversations with girls that I am interested in. I would often agonise over whether to express my feelings directly, but I was afraid of scaring them away or coming across as too forward... The appearance of RizzGPT resolved my dilemma!!!” raved one satisfied customer, and there were many others who felt the same. It seems that RizzGPT really has helped a lot of people to build their confidence and experience more romantic success.

Before starting out, I realised there were a few problems with my methodology. First, I already have a boyfriend, so I wasn’t using the app in good faith. Second, I felt like there were some ethical problems inherent to messing around with people who were looking for love, without their consent. Third, I was going to use RizzGPT for every single message, which doesn’t really reflect how people use these apps, which (from what I can see) tends to be quite sparingly, for opening messages or ways to keep a conversation going once it’s starting to flag. But this is not a peer-reviewed study for Harvard University, so you’ll have to forgive my lack of intellectual rigour.

To start with, I asked my friend Hannah to roleplay a scenario in which I slid into her DMs as a man she vaguely knew: her brief was “you’re not particularly interested in me, but you could conceivably be won over by the right level of rizz”. What followed did not inspire much confidence in the app’s capabilities. Part of the problem is that you generate a response by uploading a screenshot of a conversation, but it frequently responds to the wrong person. I ended up negging her, repeatedly, in response to my own opening question.

Hannah then mentioned that she was going to see a talk by David Suchet (an actor best known as the star of ITV’s Poirot), and here’s where RizzGPT really fumbled the bag. Something like “The only mystery I’m interested in solving is how the hell a gorgeous gal like you is still single ;)” would have been just the ticket, but it instead led me down a rabbit hole of increasingly inane responses. There was no escape from that trap I'd found myself in: all I could do was keep talking about a 77-year-old actor in an unwarrantedly saucy tone.

It would be unfair to try out RizzGPT on an app like Tinder or Hinge, where I might be wasting the time of someone who was actually yearning for a romantic connection. Grindr, on the other hand, felt somewhat more justifiable: after all, it’s pretty normal to have aimless conversations there that don’t go anywhere, and messaging someone doesn’t indicate any commitment. Sadly, part of the problem with RizzGPT, as I’d realised during the David Suchet debacle, is that it starts to fixate on a single theme with monomaniacal obsession. This time its mind drifted, for no clear reason, towards the salty air and rolling waves of the ocean. 

When I later asked the guy I’d been speaking to assess my nautical-themed chat-up lines, he said they were “quite confusing”. Still, if someone was messaging me like that and I thought they were hot, I’d probably go along with it – but it would be in spite of and not because of their rizz. As with any kind of AI technology, the more time I spend using the app, the more boring and dispiriting it becomes. If you want the RizzGPT touch without spending £7.99 a week (almost four times as much as Netflix or Spotify), all you need to do is include a wink emoji and some reference to “having an adventure” in every message.

If the dating assistants feel more like a novelty item, the biggest promise of AI is that it will revolutionise the process of matchmaking,  allowing dating apps to use more complicated algorithms and to assess compatibility at a far more sophisticated level. There are a number of new AI dating apps on the market, but one in particular struck my attention: SciMatch, founded in 2022, which uses physiognomy – the practice of discerning personality traits from facial features – to pair users with compatible partners (it claims its facial scan method can predict personality with 87 per cent accuracy). I didn’t know much about physiognomy when I downloaded the app, but I had the vague idea that it was a discredited pseudoscience associated with race science, eugenics, the Nazis and historical justifications for the slave trade – which turns out to be correct.  

Along with its sister discipline, phrenology (the practice of discerning personality through the shape of the skull), it’s made a bit of a comeback in recent years, often as a way of justifying and naturalising social inequalities, but I’ve only really seen it being promoted by anonymous neo-Nazi Twitter accounts with 200 followers, or Nietzche-loving weirdos on the fringes of Silicon Valley. It’s quite shocking to see a start-up with glowing write-ups in outlets like Elle and Cosmopolitan use the term so unabashedly.

“RizzGPT is corny but harmless and kind of fun; SciMatch is a force for true evil, albeit a not very powerful one”

When I signed up to SciMatch it scanned my face and then offered a summary of my personality so vague and flattering that it could apply to anyone (I am apparently a “hopeless romantic” with a “zest for life”). If you see someone you like, you then click a crystal ball and it offers you a percentage assessment of your compatibility with them, which is assessed on the basis of your shared personality traits, as indicated by your facial features. The accompanying explanation manages to be vague and hyper-specific at the same time: “you are committed to staying together, allowing you to more easily address your relationship’s tumultuous times”, read part of a much longer caption. There is just no way that an AI can predict all that based on the size of your nose and the shape of your brow.

On the plus side, it seems that very few people have been enticed by the prospect of a physiognomy-based dating app. I soon realised there are about five people using this app in the entire United Kingdom (it only took five minutes before I was coming across profiles written in Russian). When I tried to have an instant video date with a compatible partner, the clock ran down a 30-second timer before sadly informing me that “all the potential candidates are currently engaged in speed dating sessions with other participants”. I would be surprised if anyone, anywhere in the world, was online at that moment. One of the paid features offers you the opportunity to date your celebrity crush – you upload a picture of a famous person you’re attracted to and the system offers the nearest possible match – but if only, like, 2,000 people are using this app worldwide, the chances of hooking up with a Jacob Elordi lookalike in your local area seem slim.

Having tried out both apps, it feels unfair to assess them together: RizzGPT is corny but harmless and kind of fun; SciMatch is a force for true evil, albeit a not very powerful one. But as a broader trend, these companies seem to be responding to a growing sense that dating apps are unpleasant, as a way to spend your time, and ineffective, as a way of finding love. They are not offering anything new or transformative, but fine-tuning and tinkering with the experience as it already exists. However profound their impact might prove to be, I suspect in time they will only exacerbate the ennui which people are already feeling. The answer to the problem of dating app fatigue is unlikely to be newer and more advanced forms of technology, but something different altogether, far away from the cold and inhuman clutches of the algorithm.