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Title: Hinge CEO Says Dating AI Chatbots Is 'Playing With Fire'

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/06/23/2324250/h...

In a podcast interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel, Hinge CEO Justin McLeod
described integrating AI into dating apps as promising but warned against
relying on AI companionship, likening it to "playing with fire" and consuming
"junk food," potentially exacerbating the loneliness epidemic. He emphasized
Hinge's mission to foster genuine human connections and highlighted upcoming
AI-powered features designed to improve matchmaking and provide coaching to
encourage real-world interactions. Here's an excerpt from the interview:
Again, there's a fine line between prompting someone and coaching them inside
Hinge, and we're coaching them in a different way within a more self-
contained ecosystem. How do you think about that? Would you launch a full-on
virtual girlfriend inside Hinge? Certainly not. I have lots of thoughts about
this. I think there's actually quite a clear line between providing a tool
that helps people do something or get better at something, and the line where
it becomes this thing that is trying to become your friend, trying to mimic
emotions, and trying to create an emotional connection with you. That I think
is really playing with fire. I think we are already in a crisis of
loneliness, and a loneliness epidemic. It's a complex issue, and it's baked
into our culture, and it goes back to before the internet. But just since
2000, over the past 20 years, the amount of time that people spend together
in real life with their friends has dropped by 70 percent for young people.
And it's been almost completely displaced by the time spent staring at
screens. As a result, we've seen massive increases in mental health issues,
and people's loneliness, anxiety, and depression. I think Mark Zuckerberg was
just quoted about this, that most people don't have enough friends. But he
said we're going to give them AI chatbots. That he believes that AI chatbots
can become your friends. I think that's honestly an extraordinarily reductive
view of what a friendship is, that it's someone there to say all the right
things to you at the right moment The most rewarding parts of being in a
friendship are being able to be there for someone else, to risk and be
vulnerable, to share experiences with other conscious entities. So I think
that while it will feel good in the moment, like junk food basically, to have
an experience with someone who says all the right things and is available at
the right time, it will ultimately, just like junk food, make people feel
less healthy and mo re drained over time. It will displace the human
relationships that people should be cultivating out in the real world. How do
you compete with that? That is the other thing that is happening. It is
happening. Whether it's good or bad. Hinge is offering a harder path. So you
say, "We've got to get people out on dates." I honestly wonder about that,
based on the younger folks I know who sometimes say, �oeI just don't want to
leave the house. I would rather just talk to this computer. I have too much
social pressure just leaving the house in this way.� That's what Hinge is
promising to do. How do you compete with that? Do you take it head on? Are
you marketing that directly? I'm starting to think very much about taking it
head on. We want to continue at Hinge to champion human relationships, real
human-to-human-in-real-life relationships, because I think they are an
essential part of the human experience, and they're essential to our mental
health. It's not just because I run a dating app and, obviously, it's
important that people continue to meet. It really is a deep, personal mission
of mine, and I think it's absolutely critical that someone is out there
championing this. Because it's always easier to race to the bottom of the
brain stem and offer people junk products that maybe sell in the moment but
leave them worse off. That's the entire model that we've seen from what
happened with social media. I think AI chatbots could frankly be much more
dangerous in that respect. So what we can do is to become more and more
effective and support people more and more, and make it as easy as possible
to do the harder and riskier thing, which is to go out and form real
relationships with real people. They can let you down and might not always be
there for you, but it is ultimately a much more nourishing and enriching
experience for people. We can also champion and raise awareness as much as we
can. That's another reason why I'm here today talking with you, because I
think it's important to put out the counter perspective, that we don't just
reflexively believe that AI chatbots can be your friend, without thinking too
deeply about what that really implies and what that really means. We keep
going back to junk food, but people had to start waking up to the fact that
this was harmful. We had to do a lot of campaigns to educate people that
drinking Coca-Cola and eating fast food was detrimental to their health over
the long term. And then as people became more aware of that, a whole personal
wellness industry started to grow, and now that's a huge industry, and people
spend a lot of time focusing on their diet and nutrition and mental health,
and all these other things. I think similarly, social wellness needs to
become a category like that. It's thinking about not just how do I get this
junk social experience of social media where I get fed outraged news and
celebrity gossip and all that stuff, but how do I start building a sense of
social wellness, where I can create an enriching, intimate connection with
important people in my life. You can listen to the podcast here.

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