Choosing the best photos for your dating profile can be tough, so Tinder created a virtual curator to help you out. The artificial intelligence-powered Photo Selector will analyze your shortlist of potential photos directly from your phone and suggest those its model predicts would present you at your best.
To use the feature, a Tinder user takes a selfie for the AI to know what they look like, then permits the app to look at photos on their phone. The AI model picks out images for the user to review and decide whether to add them to their profile. Photo Selector is coming first to Tinder users in the U.S. this month, with international rollouts later this summer.
Tinder hopes the AI tool will smooth the path for setting up a dating profile. According to its own Online Opinion survey of young single people, 52% struggle to pick a profile image for dating apps, and single people under 25 spend 33 minutes on average picking a photo for their dating app profile. Perhaps it’s unsurprising then that 68% of them welcome the idea of AI assistance in picking their photos.
Though Tinder doesn’t outright say so, the study did suggest straight men in particular need the help. Straight single women find profiles with at least four images highlighting a man’s personality more attractive, and more than one face photo ups a guy’s chance of matching by 71%.
“We’re proud to be the first dating app to roll out an AI tool that can make the profile-building experience significantly easier — an area we know is one of the hardest parts of dating,” Tinder CEO Faye Iosotaluno said in a statement. “As the category leader, we’re pushing ourselves to define the industry’s best use cases for meaningful consumer AI integrations,”
Discreet AI
Tinder didn’t make much of any privacy issues with regard to the new feature, even though access and use of personal photos with AI models may make some nervous. Users might inadvertently expose sensitive or private images by granting the app access to their camera rolls. The company has data protection policies and security measures in place, but when it comes to something as intimate as photos for dating apps, it’s easy to imagine some hesitating without enough transparency and trust regarding how the images are used, stored, and protected.
That’s on top of the facial recognition element. While it is necessary to curate the photos successfully, the biometric data involved is arguably even more sensitive. Tinder may have to make an extra effort to assure users their data is anonymized when the AI processes it and that it’s not shared with third parties. Still, as AI assistants and related tools become more ubiquitous, ones that help people’s online profiles pop, whether on dating apps or anywhere else, will likely become very common.
“As demonstrated by our Photo Selector feature, we’re developing AI tech to assist you in making decisions, not to make them for you,” Iosotaluno said.
