Grindr plans to add an AI boyfriend feature to sext with you when no one is swiping right

Gone are the days when artificial intelligence was just the boogeyman in sci-fi movies. Now, it’s infiltrating every aspect of our lives, including our hookups.

In an effort to boost revenue amid rocky financial future, the gay hookup app Grindr is putting previously free features behind a paywall and adding new in-app purchases including an AI boyfriend, Platformer reports.

Last December, Grindr partnered with Ex-human Inc., which specializes in creating customizable conversational AI chatbots, to start offering an AI wingman that could help with planning dates. Now, the leading LGBTQ+ dating app is planning to take things one step further.

“If we don’t do it, someone else will,” said Grindr Chief Executive Officer George Arison told Bloomberg last year. “If you’re not first to market with something in AI, you’re going to miss out.”

Grindr is now planning to add an AI tool that will be able to sext and have an ongoing relationship with users so that when no one is swiping right on your profile, there is still a way for you to have a hookup experience with a chatbot.

Much like ChatGPT, the new AI boyfriend will be trained using previously private — and often explicit — DMs between app users, but Grindr will request permission before it begins using the private data.

While some might find the idea of being able to contact an AI chatbot when you’ve hit a dry spell and no one is swiping right on your profile, it’s still in the early stages of testing, and employees working on the project told Platformer that it’s running into the same problem many AI chatbots have in the past: it’s racist.

According to people working on the project, the chatbot has offered racist opinions, but they said it won’t be released to the public until these issues are dealt with.

In Platformer’s own testing, Ex-human’s chatbots tended to veer into problematic statements about Jews and Muslims.This is especially troublesome considering the plan is to use the technology for a queer app, where anti-LGBTQ+ statements would be harrowing, and because the bot is being trained by combing through users’ DMs, the hateful things people write each other could influence the AI boyfriend, Queerty reports.

There is no word yet on when the AI boyfriend feature will be released.