With the constant growth in audience, online dating services have a key mission— to provide safe, comfortable and fruitful communication for each user. There are essentially two options for this:
- Constantly increase their staff of moderators.
- Implement artificial intelligence and automate moderation.
But is it really possible to get by with only human resources? Even a huge staff of moderators can’t cope with a growing audience. For example, in 2021, the number of downloads of the Tinder app often exceeded 6.5 million a month.
Also, artificial intelligence is needed not only to improve moderation, but also to find the perfect match. And here it is definitely impossible to do without constant improvement of algorithms.
Today we want to tell you how dating services are using artificial intelligence right now, how efficiently it works, and whether its implementation is really justified. It’ll be interesting!
How online dating services are using AI today
1. Filtering fake accounts and inappropriate content
According to statistics, about 72% of users of dating sites and applications have added someone’s profile to the blacklist at least once. Fakes, bots, advertising accounts and problem users usually get banned. But already AI, developed by the University of Warwick, is working on Tinder, which detects bots and fake photos with an accuracy of 99%.
2. Individual recommendations
Algorithms for finding an ideal pair thanks to artificial intelligence are becoming more and more accurate. Moreover, not just hobbies, interests, age, location and the like are taken into account, but many other factors. For example, Match.com has a chatbot named Lara that syncs with Google Assistant and suggests the best dating spots in your area.
The dating site eHarmony analyzes user behavior to determine the best time to send messages to each other. And Tinder can analyze photos in order to better “understand” what kind of person is in the photo. For example, if in the picture you are holding a guitar in your hands, this will be taken into account when forming personality markers and choosing a pair.
Dating.AI and Badoo offer interesting solutions. They can analyze photographs and find potential celebrity-like partners. Ever dreamed of meeting a girl who looks like Margot Robbie or a guy who will be an exact copy of Brad Pitt? No problem! AI will help you with this.
3. Spam protection and increased security
In these matters, almost any online dating service offers its own original solutions. Let’s take a look at some of them.
- Coffee Meets Bagel — AI analyzes user profiles via a “mixed” method using nine different algorithms at once.
- Hinge — uses the Gale-Shapley algorithm to find a perfect match. Fun fact: this algorithm was awarded the Nobel Prize.
- Tinder — has been actively using AI since 2017, when the Super Likeable feature was implemented. Its task was to find a more suitable pair. Subsequently, the capabilities of artificial intelligence have expanded. Currently, each user is assigned an ELO rating. The score depends on many factors: profile quality, number of left/right swipes, photos, message exchange activity, etc.
- Loveflutter — integrates with Foursquare to offer users the chance to meet in person at locations equidistant from both people’s homes.
- Blued — uses AI to analyze the conversations and correspondence between users to identify offensive statements and other violations of the rules of the site.
- Bumble — uses an artificial intelligence-based Private Detector feature that detects unwanted images with 98% accuracy and blurs them.
As you can see, not all AI algorithms are aimed specifically at finding a pair. Now developers are paying much more attention to the safety and privacy of users. This is not surprising, because during the period of the pandemic and quarantine, the number of crimes committed on the Internet, according to various sources, increased by 60-80%.
Artificial intelligence is vital where moderators can’t cope with the volume of work
Let’s imagine that all the work on moderation, security, search for a potential mate and analysis of user actions was done by a single person. They’d be faced with several problems at once:
- One moderator would not be able to fully monitor and control even a couple of dozen users. And there are millions of them.
- Reading conversation threads, and indeed a deep analysis of profiles in some countries, can be a direct violation of the law and even lead to legal proceedings.
- It is impossible to exclude the human factor. People tend to make mistakes. This is why you see so often in reviews of dating apps that accounts are blocked for no apparent reason. Of course, algorithms also make mistakes, but much less often.
It is important to add here that AI is being implemented not only on classic dating sites and applications, but also in chat roulettes. It’s actually on chat roulette sites that artificial intelligence is even more important. There are several reasons: a huge audience, the ability to use the service without registration (in most cases) and a very motley user base.
Let’s remember the first chat roulette of the modern type was Chatroulette. At the beginning of its existence, it attracted about a million users per day. But later, because of poor moderation, the audience dispersed to other services — https://www.emeraldchat.com/, https://videochat.chat, https://ome.tv, https://camsurf.com, https://chatspin.com/, and so on. For almost a decade, Chatroulette has had virtually no moderation. Only in 2020, due to an active influx of users thanks to the pandemic, the developers finally began to modernize their service. It was at this time that artificial intelligence was implemented, which analyzes the behavior of users on the platform and, if necessary, immediately blocks offenders.
Other popular chat roulettes have followed the example of Chatroulette. The period 2020-2021 has become a truly turning point for chat roulettes. And now, given the growing demand for such platforms, this is especially important.
AI makes your online dating experience smoother
The online dating industry has changed dramatically over the past few years. Hundreds of new dating services have emerged, and the older players have implemented many fresh features to improve user experience and safety. Now we see that interest in such platforms continues to grow. This means that the modernization and implementation of artificial intelligence will also continue.
And finally, we want to send a message to those who believe that AI is bad and that it is necessary to completely abandon its use. The fact is that you already come across AI all the time: when you search for something on the Internet, use social networks and even communicate in a messenger app. Artificial intelligence is used all over the place, even if you don’t notice it. So it’s simply pointless to fight its appearance in dating services.
