Dating apps reject AI, singles claim AI makes dating ‘not real’

Major dating apps, like the rest of the tech industry, are leaning heavily toward AI, but one app is promoting “human intelligence” instead.

Hily is “rebooting” HI (human intelligence) within the app. This is an ironic response to apps like Tinder and Bumble reinventing their services with AI capabilities. Recently, Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd announced that Bumble is retiring Swipe to make way for something else. Although Wolfe Herd was vague on the details, Bumble plans to launch a new AI-powered experience that quickly drew backlash from daters. As Mashable reported in May, some believe Bumble has “lost the plot.”

Highly’s “HI” seems to have been inspired by the online outrage over it, but it also draws from Highly’s own research. The August 2025 Truth Report found that 69 percent of Gen Z and 74 percent of Millennial American daters (based on a survey of 1,559 U.S. daters) believe that the involvement of AI in online dating is making dating less reliable.

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More than half of young American daters (54% of women and 63% of men), regardless of gender, said they would be less attracted to someone on a dating app that also allegedly used AI to create their profiles. Nevertheless, Hiley found that the top reason women and Gen Z daters use AI in online dating is to create a self-introduction (51% and 50%, respectively). Meanwhile, 52 percent of men and 47 percent of Millennials have used it to provide conversation suggestions.

So even though AI appears to be anti-AI, some daters still use it when dating online. Still, Hiley is sticking with “HI” for now.

“We use technology where it helps, but we’re not rushing to replace the human part of the relationship just because AI is trending,” Liubomyr Pivtorak, chief product officer at Hily, said in a press release.

Julie Nguyen, a dating coach at Highly, said, “When we start outsourcing connection to AI and optimizing it for love, we start to lose our intuitive ability to make our own choices. And we start to lose the beautiful, human things that that process teaches us about connection.”