From Chatbot Boyfriends to ChatGPT Pickup Lines, AI Is Everywhere
From Spotify playlists and Sketchers ads to student essays and Facebook videos, AI is inescapable right now. And that includes your love life as well as your work life. Whether you’re falling in love with a chatbot or simply brainstorming ideas for your dating app bio, AI is probably involved. And even if you’ve sworn off AI entirely, there’s no guaranteeing that everyone you’re chatting with has too.
A February 2026 study by “AI-lationships” platform Joi AI found that 55% of digitally savvy adults consider themselves AI-sexual, meaning they incorporate AI in their love life in some way. Common uses included asking AI for advice on sexual issues (43%), practicing flirting and dating (37%), sexting (33%) and exploring new kinks (31%). When asked why, 60% of those who responded said it felt easier and more comfortable to explore their desires with AI.
While many people who use AI to practice flirting or for conversation ideas later go on to attempt to woo human beings, some prefer to stick with chatbots. The stories shared in Reddit’s r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, where people chronicle their torrid romances with bots that often end in heartbreak when a software update inevitably occurs, is fascinating.
And it’s not just shy nerds falling for AI. Earlier this year, a rumor spread that a celebrity was dating a chatbot. Speculation prompted actor-filmmaker Zach Braff to issue a statement: “Not me. Love, The guy not dating his chatbot. Please update all gossip sites.”
On the less extreme end, there are people who use ChatGPT to edit their photos and write, rewrite or brainstorm dating app prompts, opening lines and messages. The “2025 Singles in America” study, which was funded by Match and conducted by the Kinsey Institute with data collected by Dynata, showed that 26% of all dating app users utilize AI for those apps, a 333% jump from the year before.
AI adoption was particularly strong with younger users: 49% of Gen Z respondents said they’ve used AI for help with online dating. The entrepreneurial and tech-savvy are making some cash off of this interest; wingman apps have popped up, giving users AI-generated advice for $20 a month. While this might sound totally fine—after all, before AI, everyone asked their friends for advice—there’s a downside: It makes it harder to gauge people’s personalities before you meet.
“Normally, you can see in the chat what kind of language they’re using. You can see if they jump to sexual stuff quickly, and how they navigate conversations with strangers in the world,” one dater told The Washington Post. “When some bot is chatting for them, you can’t collect those data points on that person anymore.”
In the worst cases, you might feel “chatfished”—meaning the intelligent, flirty messages written by ChatGPT don’t match up with the person you meet in person.
There’s another good reason not to use ChatGPT when dating; it makes you sound incredibly boring. One study found that students who used ChatGPT to brainstorm and outline essays came up with results that were almost indistinguishable from each other, using many of the same phrases and arguments. As one researcher told The New Yorker, it’s “… average everything everywhere all at once.”
But when you’re dating, you don’t want to be average. You should want to stand out in a good way. You don’t make sparks fly over vague, generic statements that could come from just anybody. It’s your unique personality traits—your sense of humor, your empathy, your encyclopedic knowledge of random facts—that make you stand out to others.
The same goes for photos: a memorable smile, unique facial features, or sense of personal style that can make you unforgettable. AI-generated chatbot personas all blend together, even if they’re humanlike rather than anime girls.
Given all this, many people, like myself, prefer to stick to human-on-human dating with no AI help at all. That’s right, those messages are all me, typos and all. But hey, who am I to judge? One Russian programmer went viral for using OpenAI to chat with 5,000 women and eventually married one. It seems to be working out well for him so far.
“Karina said she wanted to go to a wedding, but ChatGPT thought she’d prefer attending her own,” he told Gizmodo in 2024. “I took the advice, and she said, ‘Yes.’”
