The Doomed Dream of an AI Matchmaker

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Of course, the dating-app questionnaires of today aren’t the same ones people were completing in 2013. And although major apps already use machine learning to note users’ preferences and to suggest prospects, it’s possible that as AI improves and as dating sites collect more personal information from users, the result could eventually be more fine-tuned matches. But exactly how these algorithms are meant to anticipate human chemistry remains unclear. Unless dating companies have access to some new and groundbreaking information, one big problem remains: Romantic compatibility is largely still a mystery. People tend to couple with those who are demographically similar to them, yet when it comes to people’s personalities, tendencies, and “values”—that vague but relentlessly used term—decades of research have revealed no simple rule for what makes people click. As Eli Finkel, a Northwestern University psychology professor, once told me, a real-life spark is unpredictable partly because it depends somewhat on chance: What one person just happens to say might resonate with the other one, or lead to a topic that proves conversationally fruitful—or not. At the moment, only one true test of chemistry exists: Two brave souls have to meet and see what happens.

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