Ten-Herng Lai & Alfred Archer

You finally started an online conversation with a stranger you find attractive, yet you don’t really know what to say. They seem happy to talk, but you struggle to find the correct responses. You worry that their patience is growing thin. You pray for some guidance. Luckily, the solution could be just a few clicks away.

After all, you have the power of AI at your fingertips. Why not use it to come up with something fun and interesting to say?

Yet many of us might hesitate in this scenario. Researchers have already warned of “cognitive debt” – students can use AI to write excellent assignments, but then fail miserably in final exams because they remember nothing. No one would want to show up to a date unable to recall anything they had copied and pasted into an online conversation.

Flirting online, like many other emotionally loaded tasks such as writing an apology, a eulogy or a message of congratulations, reflects how you feel about the person. The philosopher Talbot Brewer wrote that a person’s efforts to make sense of their emotions through articulating them can reveal what they value.

For example, suppose someone thought she didn’t especially care about her work. But then she found herself feeling pride when she was promoted. Her emotion may reveal to her that she does in fact care about workplace success.

In our recent research, we contend that using AI to flirt – or for any other task where personal connection is valuable – risks bypassing those moments where emotions can reveal important self-knowledge.

Perhaps in flirting online, a person may not read what their date says carefully. Instead, they might quickly copy the text into ChatGPT and then equally quickly paste the response back into the chat.

Alternatively, perhaps an AI wingman is already integrated into the dating app, allowing people to simply click and send the suggested text. They don’t pay attention to what the date says, maybe overlooking potential deal-breakers, things that might be odd, or small stylistic details that would otherwise give them some pause.

By outsourcing this emotional task to ChatGPT, it’s possible for a person to deprive themselves of the opportunity to really let the moments affect them. They could miss the chance to properly consider whether they would be happy to make compromises for their date. They may not even know whether they are genuinely excited about the date.

Instead of slowly articulating their feelings and, in so doing, working out what they value in a relationship, they are authorising AI to say whatever might impress their date.

There’s also the issue of privacy – the flirty exchanges could find their way into training data. And is the AI wingman even trustworthy? It could misrepresent the person using it – and the other party might feel they’d suffered a deception. Even before AI, researchers have questioned whether lying on dating platforms invalidates consent.