Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Fake AI People Won’t Fix Online Dating

Computer-generated images may inspire even more distrust, and surely won’t lead to the love of a lifetime.

January 16, 2020 at 1:30 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

What if that’s a bot you’re flirting with? — What if that’s a bot you’re flirting with?
Photographer: Eva Hambach/AFP/Getty Images

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Last week, the Washington Post reported what sounds like a match made in Hades: online dating sites are now hooking up with artificial intelligence startups that generate fake faces for use in ads. The dating sites hope this will enable them to project more diversity, while the AI startups are counting on dating sites to help normalize their disconcerting technology.

Having AI-generated people lure us to dating sites might sound like one further slide into sci-fi dystopia.1 But it’s not that different from what’s already going on. Dating sites have been using stock photos, models and actors in their ads since inception, as have some users. And that’s better for customer privacy than the genuine -- but very creepy -- strategy of borrowing users’ photos for use in ads.