How to win at online dating using AI

About 10 years ago, while comfortably roasting golden brown marshmallows over a campfire with new friends, my father asked the couple he was with, “How did you two meet?”

The unease was palatable. “Online,” the man grumbled out.

Online dating, which until recently was a secretive, almost embarrassing and certainly undiscussed activity, has almost completely taken over dating. And if you haven’t tried online dating yourself, you have probably at least taken a single friend's phone and swiped left and right through the endless inventory of faces. (If you haven’t, you should try it — it’s a blast.)

With almost 70 million Americans using dating apps, more than 40 percent of couples meeting by online dating and over 30 percent of couples getting married now having met online, it is by far the most common method of getting together.

One of the biggest complaints about online dating is the endless supply of fish in the sea and the belief that the grass is always greener. But what happens when that grass involves the use of artificial intelligence? That implies a whole new ballgame and maybe a chance for you to get an edge.

According to Vanity Fair, online dating is tantamount to the “dating apocalypse,” filled with no-strings-attached sex and an endless supply of new dates (with some even double booking dates on one night...no comment here).

But it is also really hard and time-consuming. People spend an average of two or more hours per day online dating, and that is just the swiping and messaging part, not including meeting in person. It's almost a full time job.

Also, people meet in person with only about one out of every 57 people they swipe and message with. This means that dating apps are a numbers game and have quickly become quantity over quality.

Depending on your age, it is really hard out there. Young single men outnumber single young women nearly two to one. It takes two to tango, so how is this happening? Put simply, young women are dating older men, because older men are more likely to commit.

The average age of first marriage is 28 for women and 30 for men. The age difference between the two is historically consistent with 1950, when the age of first marriage for women was 20 and the age for men was 23. The difference is that back then, there were far fewer lonely young men, because women did not need to look to older men. They still had time to marry men of their own age.

Now that the age of a woman's first marriage is approaching 30, women find themselves pressed for time if they want to have children. They can't afford to wait for someone their own age to be ready, hence this rise in younger single men. Women in their 40s now have to look at men in their 50s, because the men in their 40’s are dating the women in the 30’s. In short, these unmarriageable young men are messing everything up!

So, with all these difficulties laid out, how do we get an edge in the dating game pool that is rigged for us to fail? We make it a numbers game in our favor that ends in actual dates, not just endless messages.

A man on a dating app is telling you how much you have in common. You both love dogs, traveling and the regular Netflix and chill night. After about 10 flirty back-and-forth messages, he asks you out for drinks and you go to meet him. He seems great, except that he has a cat. It turns out he didn’t write any of those messages. Rather, his AI-integrated dating app did it.

Is the fact he likes cats instead of dogs a deal-breaker? No comment. But it worked! You had a nice date. You actually met each other. And now you can both go on using this AI-integrated dating app that comes up with killer opening lines for you.

Through the miracle of modern technology, you can simply skip the two hours a day of swiping and messaging. Instead, you can just go on whatever dates your AI sets up for you after flirting and texting, probably with the other person's AI. If it means you go on actual dates instead of messaging forever, it seems worth it to me.

Liberty Vittert is a professor of data science at Washington University in St. Louis and the resident on-air statistician for NewsNation, a sister company of The Hill.