What 700,000 Users Taught Me About Dating, AI, and Being Human

It’s early 2023. As new people start coming in, I get pushed into another passenger and happen to glance at his screen. He’s taking a screenshot of a Bumble chat and putting it into ChatGPT. After apologizing for looking over his shoulder, I strike up a conversation with him and it gives me an insight I already knew, but suddenly saw differently: Men don’t know how to talk on dating apps, especially those from an engineering background.

After talking to more than 80+ people across genders, we built DatingAI.pro, an AI assistant designed to help people get better at dating. We went viral across social media, got featured in leading journals and reached 700,000+ users in just a few months. Along the way, we learned that people don’t necessarily want AI or need it, they want an outcome; that trust is a product feature, especially when technology enters deeply personal experiences; that personalization should make people feel understood rather than simply observed; and that too much automation can sometimes remove the intentionality that makes human experiences meaningful.

I want to take the audience through this journey to come to the realisation and explore the broader question: as AI makes it easier than ever to build, what should we actually be building? The answer isn’t simply more automation or smarter AI. It is better human experiences.