The Dating Apps Reporting Project is an 18-month investigation. It was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center's AI Accountability Network and the Markup, now a part of CalMatters, and co-published with the Guardian and the 19th. When a young woman in Denver met up with a smiling cardiologist she matched with on the dating app Hinge, she had no way of knowing that the company behind the app had already received reports from two other women who had accused him of rape. She met the 34-year-old doctor with green eyes and thinning hair at Highland Tap & Burger, a sports bar in a trendy neighborhood. It went well enough that she accepted an invitation to go back to his apartment. As she emerged from his bathroom, he handed her a tequila soda. What transpired over the next 24 hours, according to court testimony, reads like every person's dating app nightmare. After sipping the drink, the woman started to lose control. She fell to the ground, and the man started to film her. He put her in a headlock, kissing her forehead; she struggled to free herself but managed to grab her things and leave. He followed her out the door, holding her shoes and trying to force her back inside, but she was able to call an Uber, vomiting in the car on the way home. She woke up at home, soaking wet on her bathroom floor, the key to her house still in her door. She continued vomiting for hours.

Mere moments after his swearing in Monday, President Donald Trump made a proclamation to attendees of his inauguration: "It shall henceforth be the policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female." Trump then signed an executive order disparaging what the White House called "gender ideology" and claiming that a person's sex is "not changeable and [is] grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality." Trump's order, which was widely seen as an unscientific attempt to roll back the rights of transgender and gender-expansive people, also instructs federal agencies "to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder's sex," rather than their gender identity. It was one of 78 orders signed on Monday, some of which were part of Trump's attempts to end Biden-era policies that "socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life." While the executive order only affects federal policy, the broader implications are vast.

ChatGPT has already been used to write essays, tell jokes and even write best man speeches. But it seems the helpful AI bot can even make sure people on dating apps aren't lying to you about their height. Women are screenshotting photos from dating app profiles, inserting them into ChatGPT and asking it to provide an estimate of how tall they are. Justine Moore, a venture capitalist in San Francisco, said the AI's estimates are accurate to within an inch – not just for men but for women too. So it may be a good tool to size up your romantic interest before you arrange to meet.

A class-action lawsuit filed in a US federal court last Valentine's Day accuses Match Group – the owners of Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid dating apps, among others – of using a "predatory business model" and of doing everything in its power to keep users hooked, in flagrant opposition to Hinge's claim that it is "designed to be deleted". The lawsuit crystallised an ocean of dissatisfaction with the apps, and stimulated a new round of debate over their potential to harm mental health, but for scientists who study romantic relationships it sidestepped the central issue: do they work? Does using the apps increase your chances of finding your soulmate, or not? The answer is, nobody knows. "The science isn't there," says sociologist Elizabeth Bruch of the University of Michigan, who has studied online dating for a decade.

When I met my husband, who happens to be white, he told me that he was always seeing women with blonde hair on Tinder and he's not really into blondes. No matter how many times he had swiped left on blondes, the algorithms were always recommending them to him, presumably because pop culture dictates that white men prefer blondes. Luckily for us, the algorithms' tendency to stack blonde women in his swipe deck worked out in our favor because I'm a black woman who, at the time, had blonde hair. In nearly 10 years of swiping through profiles on Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and OkCupid, I learned that dating apps can provide pathways for finding friendship, adventure, romance, and sometimes, love. But there was one aspect of dating app culture that I couldn't ignore because it was often the first thing matches wanted to talk about: race.

For the record, I don't own socks with sloths on them. I have three pairs with the CNET logo on them. ChatGPT thinks I might, though, and it also thinks this fact could get me matches on Hinge, or Bumble, or any dating app that has the audacity to ask me for a random fact about myself. Click to read more Love Syncs. Here's a random fact about me: When I tested how ChatGPT might handle rewriting my dating app profile, the experimental AI chatbot tried to turn me into a cringey manic pixie dream girl who forgets to water her "jungle" of houseplants, dances to her favorite "tunes" and is looking for "a fellow weirdo" to go on *shudders* "adventures" with.

ChatGPT, a dating platform, recently started using AI software to test a new category of match questions. However, 47% of users were unsure whether they'd continue dating someone who admitted to using AI technology to first communicate. The online dating platform is experimenting with the AI technology to roll out a new category of match questions. The six questions ChatGPT yielded have already been answered by over 135,000 users.

For the record, I don't own any socks with sloths on them. I have three pairs with the CNET logo on them. ChatGPT thinks I might, though, and it also thinks this fact could get me matches on Hinge, or Bumble, or any dating app that has the audacity to ask me for a random fact about myself. Click to read more Love Syncs. Here's a random fact about me: When I tested how ChatGPT might handle rewriting my dating app profile, the experimental AI chatbot tried to turn me into a cringey manic pixie dream girl who forgets to water her "jungle" of houseplants, dances to her favorite "tunes" and is looking for "a fellow weirdo" to go on *shudders* "adventures" with.

Dating app OkCupid is the latest company to get in on the AI and ChatGPT frenzy. The company's head of global communications Michael Kaye told TechCrunch in an email that OkCupid is testing a new category of match questions generated by the OpenAI chatbot. The news was first reported by Mashable. The app's match questions let you define yourself and what's important to you, and your match percentage with someone shows how compatible OkCupid thinks you might be. The app has thousands of match questions, and is now testing some that were generated by ChatGPT.

Executives at facial recognition firm Clarifai may have sighed with relief in March 2021 when a judge agreed that they could not be sued for violating Illinois' biometric privacy law, but then the federal government came knocking. The Federal Trade Commission now wants to know how the face image that a woman posted on the OkCupid dating site ended up being used as training data by Clarifai without her consent or disclosing the transaction as required by Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act. Clarifai makes computer vision, deep learning AI and biometrics systems. Claiming that its investigation is being stonewalled by Match Group, owner of OkCupid, the FTC has filed suit (case number 1:22-mc-00054), according to Bloomberg Law. The government claims that OkCupid engaged in unfair and deceptive conduct by sharing biometric data with Clarifai in 2014.