For years, San Francisco has been a haven for AI optimists, leaving many of them baffled when they travel beyond the Bay Area and encounter people outside their industry who despise the tech.
Increasingly, though, not even the City by the Bay is managing to keep AI hatred at, well, bay — at least if its dating scene is any indication. According to on the ground reporting by The Verge, AI has become a dealbreaker among the lovelorn on dating apps, despite the city being the intellectual heart of the AI boom.
“Hinge has a prompt where you can say, ‘We’ll get along if.” Sometimes people will be like, ‘F*ck AI,’” a 25-year-old analyst told the outlet. It only took her a few minutes of swiping to pull up a profile that said: “You should *not* go out with me if… you use AI.”
Even local voters are swiping left on the tech. Several Bay Area cities, including San Francisco, Oakland, and Richmond, have passed short-term moratoriums on data center construction over the past few months. Other intrusions of tech into daily life have caused friction among locals, including the proliferation of AI food slop posters and self-driving robotaxis.
Some consider AI a central concern in their search for a partner for altogether different reasons. Another lonely heart The Verge talked to works at an AI safety nonprofit and can’t help but factor in how AI might soon destroy the world when he considers his future love life and considerations like having kids.
“A lot of people are planning for what they want their life to look like five, 10, 15 years down the line,” he told the outlet. “For me, it’s hard to have that planning conversation because I don’t really expect a long-term future.”
So would he date someone who works in AI? He’s not quite sure. “They don’t think very hard about the societal impacts of their actions because they’re mostly in it for the paycheck or because it’s interesting,” he added.
Of course, this is San Francisco we’re talking about. So naturally people consider AI important to dating because they use the tech to optimize their love escapades.
One 21-year-old software engineer explained to the Verge how he used AI to automate his dating life since he’s too busy running a startup. He lets an AI agent control his Hinge account where it mimics how he texts and acts while automatically messaging women, gauges if a woman makes a good match, and automatically marks down a date on his calendar
“If you are a founder, you have to put a value on your time, so you can’t be doing low-leverage activities. Protect your dopamine, folks,” he told the site, claiming that he goes on two dates a week. His AI dating scheme, he boasted, has lowered his “CPN” — or, with all apologies in advance, “cost per nut.”
Only in San Francisco. You take the AI luddites with the AI lunatics.
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