After Sam’s ex joked that her sister found him ugly, he turned to AI. Google Gemini had a look at the photo and politely disagreed. AI has been his wingman ever since, aiding his dating life by giving pep talks and vetting his messages.

The 27-year-old from Stoke-on-Trent is not the only AI-assisted romantic – a survey of 3,000 British singles published this month by Match Group, the owner of the Tinder and Hinge platforms, found 39% had used AI in their dating lives.

Relying on AI is bad, Sam tells the Guardian, adding he would rather begin dating in person, but there is a “paradigm shift in dating that’s occurring, which is really odd, where everything is expected to start online”.

The proportion of AI use in dating is even higher for younger generations, rising to 66% for members of gen Z (people born in the mid 1990s to early 2010s), and 53% of millennials (those born in the early 1980s to mid-90s).

Sam says pressure to make a good impression on dating apps means a misunderstood message could risk him losing out on dates. “Online dating … as a guy it’s a bit of a ghost town,” he says. “Rather than saying: ‘Hey, how’s your weekend going?’ it’s thinking about what I can pick up that might get a response.”

The most common use of AI across all cohorts, according to Match, is to get advice about someone they are talking to, plan date ideas, practise conversations, write a dating profile or messages, and vet whether profiles or photos are genuine. Using AI to alter a photo is a no-no for the majority of singles, the survey says.

A single mother from New Zealand, who asked to remain anonymous, says she has used AI as a dating mentor. “I did not really date before I met my ex-husband … with ChatGPT I set it up to coach me to become more secure – to not panic about any delay in messaging, to not rush into anything,” she says.

One man from Melbourne, Australia, who began dating after his 20-year marriage ended, says AI made finding his current partner faster by assessing people he “matched” with and testing his responses. “It was getting [to be] quite a lot of work, like all the chats and the profiles. So I thought: ‘How can I use AI just to sort of speed it up a little bit?’” he says.

The 51-year-old adds that the chatbot he was using helped him think twice about profiles he’d overlooked. “[With] my current partner, it was really aggressive with me saying that: ‘Nah, she’s your vibe, she just takes shit photos.’ And then I meet her at a cafe and she’s absolutely drop-dead gorgeous,” he says.

When he told his partner he had used AI in their exchanges, she also admitted to using Anthropic’s Claude chatbot to analyse his responses. He says she joked that the “two Claudes were probably just chatting away behind the scenes”. It is a risky admission, though – about a third of UK singles said they would end a date if they found out AI had been used to write a potential paramour’s messages.

But, while a few singles like to discuss how their date went with a chatbot (7%), far more prefer a group chat (29%) or their parents (20%), according to the Match survey. “Maybe our friends are becoming more distant because of technology, a little more hands off, compared to the generation before us [who] would get together in their flat or the pub and just absolutely dish the dirt,” says Dec, 31, from London, who uses ChatGPT as a “sounding board” when chatting with single men.

Dec says he uploaded his dating conversations to ChatGPT and gave it prompts such as: “Tell me what you think the red flags there are”, and: “What does this connection look like?”

Although deploying the chatbot charmer led to a number of dates, Dec worries that his “brain feels like it’s rotting because everything’s just offloaded to AI now”. He adds: “We all know it’s going to be a bit of a yes man sometimes.”

The Match survey also hinted at a robotic romantic future where autonomous AIs do people’s dating work for them. More than a quarter of respondents liked the idea of two people’s assistants talking to each other and reporting back before the people speak – even if a majority think the idea is “unacceptable”. Match’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, says the company is taking a “hard stance” against bot-to-bot dating.

“In a world where people say that they’re more alienated than ever, are hungrier for connection than ever, we don’t get closer to that goal of human connection by having robots talk to each other,” he says.

Sam agrees that AI can only enhance his prospects by so much: “If I replace my humour with AI I think I’ve died as a person.”