Mashable

You know that feeling of anguish when you’re trying to think of the perfect opening line on a dating app? Or when a match replies but you’re stressing at work and simply don’t have the capacity to think of something witty-but-chill-but-hilarious? Well, there’s an app for that now.

Welcome to the world of AI dating assistant apps. No, this isn't about fake photos or virtual girlfriends. Instead, apps like Rizz and WingAI are generating opening lines and conversation replies – all you have to do is upload screenshots of the profiles or messages. You can select different conversation tones from "NSFW" to "casual", and the aim is to remove some of the burden of modern dating.

Feeling uneasy? Think this marks the end of authenticity in the sorry minefield that is already the online dating scene? That it’ll never take off? Well, actually, a 2024 report by dating app Flirtini shows that a whopping 55 percent of people have already used AI, such as ChatGPT, to generate messages to send to dates. A 2024 study by McAfee shows that over one in four Americans (30 percent of men, 27 percent of women) also already use AI to enhance their dating profile – the next venture for Rizz and WingAI, and a feature already available on YourMoveAI.

Why are people using AI dating assistant apps?

So, who’s actually using these apps then? Have you been reeled in by AI without knowing? And is it really as creepy as it seems? I speak to regular AI dating app users and other daters to find out whether it’s the next frontier of modern dating. 

Artem, a 35-year-old accountant from Miami has been on Rizz for around eight months and uses it to replace pestering the group chat. "My friends are much funnier than me, so I’d often workshop clever responses with them for a match," he says. "But obviously, I can’t lean on them all the time and the AI app is available 24/7."

SEE ALSO: Why some people on dating apps just want to be 'pen pals'

As for how it works, for memorable openers he uploads a screenshot of his match’s dating profile and chooses the tone of "Rizz" – a relatively spicy, cheeky mode. The app suggests a selection of opening lines relating to the profile and Artem hits refresh, or adds in key words to focus on, until he finds one that suits. For help with conversations already on the go, he uploads a screenshot of the exchange and receives suggestions for his reply. Artem rarely copies and pastes directly, instead he uses the suggestions to get his own creative juices flowing.

"The other day it gave me the opening line of, 'If you had a third nipple, where would it be?' which I obviously didn't use, but it got me thinking," he says. "The girl I was talking to had loads of tattoos, so I asked her, 'If you had a tattoo and you could never show anyone, what would it be?'" Another reportedly successful opener – this time, for a woman who worked for a non-profit – reads: "Hey, so I'm hosting this charity event next week for people who can't reach orgasm. If you can't cum, please let me know."

I’ll just let that sit for a bit. 

I really did try to keep an open mind, but both of those lines pretty much turned my stomach. The cringe factor is toe curling, obviously, but the sexual innuendo side is just downright uncomfortable – a consistent problem I noticed when messing about on the apps myself. Practically 99 percent of the suggestions I got were unsendable, and if I’d received them from someone else, it’d likely be an immediate block . (Notably: "Hey there, amazing mind! Your intellect is arousing, but so is that naughty tongue of yours. wink") The apps claim to be trained with the help of male and female dating coaches, but surely no woman would sign that off?

SEE ALSO: The best dating apps for introverts who prefer books to bars

Artem insists it pays off with practice, though. His main reason for loving the app is down to dating fatigue – basically burnout and exhaustion from meeting new people and it going nowhere. "There's an element of exhaustion, for sure,” he says. “Chatting with one person is cool and fun, but it can be emotionally draining when you end up speaking to five or eight people at once while you try to decide who to choose to focus on." Using Rizz means he can devote less bandwidth to coming up with the kind of clever one-liners that reap success in the Tinder world.

This echoes a wider sentiment from app daters these days – that the process has somewhat lost its sheen and is now just a means to an end. A 2024 study by Forbes Health found that 79 percent of Gen Z report dating app burnout, with women feeling it more at 80 percent compared to 74 percent of males.

"If I have one more, ‘Hey, what's up? How are you?’ conversation I'm done."

That’s why Taylor, a 30-year-old vet from Florida, uses WingAI. "If I have one more, ‘Hey, what's up? How are you?’ conversation I'm done," she says. "Using the app opens the conversation up more, in a fun way. It helps with the fatigue and makes it more interesting."

Doesn’t all of this just create more admin in the dating process, though? Apparently not. "I was already going back and forth on Google, searching for fun openers relating to certain jobs," she says, a method Artem also used to use. Taylor uses WingAI to inspire her first lines on Bumble but, like Artem, always edits the suggestion to make it sound more like her personality. "I don’t always like the ideas, but they give me an idea of where to go with it," she says. "I make sure it’s a bit of a hybrid between me and the app."

As for the authenticity of it all, Taylor thinks it’s only as inauthentic as the rest of online dating. "Dating on the apps is always fake and superficial to begin with. You match based on what someone looks like and the highly curated persona they put out there," she says. "As long as AI isn’t having the entire conversation for you, I don’t see the problem."

It's a fair point. Polishing your profile can take hours, weeks and more friends than you’ve had dates. The witty Hinge prompt that sold you on someone could easily be their bezzie mate’s humour, not theirs. There are the outright liars to consider, too: According to a recent Forbes Health survey, close to one in five adults polled claim to lie about their age, with men even more likely to tweak their numbers at 23 percent compared to 19 percentof women. Other reported fibs include income (14 percent), height (12 percent), as well as hobbies and interests (14 percent). Think of all the people paying for premium dating app accounts as well, which offer various leg-ups like sorting your potential matches by who’s most likely to be responsive – whether that’s a new member or someone active today.

"If I completely relied on the app suggestions and didn’t work in my personality then, yes, it would be an inauthentic representation of myself."

Bangalore-based Dhruv, 25, agrees with Taylor. "If I completely relied on the app suggestions and didn’t work in my personality then, yes, it would be an inauthentic representation of myself," says the UX designer who’s been using DatingAI.pro regularly for the past three months. “But I’d also screw up big time when it comes to actually meeting in-person.” He believes you can hardly trick someone into a relationship through using an AI app because texting is such a small part of building that spark – you have to meet them or speak to them at some point.

"The app is more about effective initial exchanges and assisting me to be my best self," adds Artem. "Each user is still making the decisions about what to send and what not to send. For every line I use, there might be 12 that I throw away."

Are dating AI assistants any good?

So how successful is it, actually? Dhruv claims he’s already seen drastic results: "I used to receive one to two matches per week, but after using DatingAI I’ve started receiving six or seven." This success rate is even higher than the hefty promise WingAI makes of increasing your reply rate by 250 percent. Artem feels like his success has stayed the same, but the app has grown his confidence and lowered his stress levels. He sees no shame in using the app, either. "I'm 35, so when I was in high school dating apps didn’t exist and people meeting on the internet was a huge stigma," he continues. "But now the internet and dating on the internet is our default. I don’t see why these apps wouldn’t become a normal part of the process."

But what do daters who’ve never heard of these apps think of all this? London-based Talia, 31, thought it sounded like a slippery slope in the already confusing dating game at first. "If this becomes the norm, surely it means so much extra time wasted going on dates only to find they’re nothing like they came across in their messages?" she says. After more consideration, though, she was thrilled at the prospect of more interesting conversations, but actually testing the apps left her disappointed. "If they gave genuinely good suggestions, I’d be all over it. 

I find myself in Talia’s camp. Frankly, I’m a convert to the actual concept in theory. But the current offerings just don’t hit well enough yet. There’s the price point to consider, too: YourMoveAI is £4.99 per week (scaling cheaper per month and year), WingAI and Rizz are flat fees of £6.99 and a whopping £9.99 per week, respectively.

SEE ALSO: The best dating apps and sites in August 2024

And the biggest point of all still looms large: asking a non-sentient computer program that isn’t capable of love or sex is simply not the same as asking a friend you know and trust, a real-life person who’s actually been on dates before. Plus, could these apps be teaching a whole generation of men with poor flirting or social skills that it’s normal to start off conversations with such inappropriate sexual innuendos? And it is mostly men. Rizz members are currently 66 percent male, while YourMove.AI’s rises to 85 percent and DatingAI.pro a whopping 99 percent.

If the apps can get cheaper and better, they could change the dating game. But more women, and perhaps young people who actually have game, need to be brought in to help programme the software. What do women want? Well, it’s certainly not to be asked about third nipples.

Need more proof that Elon Musk's DOGE team, apparently in charge of making the U.S. government more efficient, has no idea what they're doing?

Here goes: The DOGE.gov website, created to document the findings and changes implemented by DOGE, can apparently be edited by anyone, as the database access has been left wide open.

The first to report this was 404Media, who spoke with two unnamed security researchers confirming the security flaw — if it indeed can be called that, as it appears that there's no "security" of any kind implemented here.

SEE ALSO: Cybersecurity group sues DOGE over data access

As of this writing, two pages on the DOGE.gov site have been defaced, with one saying "THESE "EXPERTS" LEFT THEIR DATABASE OPEN - roro" and the other "This is a joke of a .gov site."

Sigh. Credit: DOGE.gov/unknown hacker

404Media's sources say that the DOGE.gov site was seemingly built on a Cloudflare Pages site that's not hosted on government servers. The examples listed above were created by one of the outlet's sources as to illustrate how insecure the site is.

"Feels like it was completely slapped together. Tons of errors and details leaked in the page source code," they said.

DOGE is a new initiative, started by Trump's administration and led by Musk, tasked to reduce inefficiencies and modernize the federal government. Despite the complex and delicate nature of this task, DOGE has apparently been staffed by college grads with little to no government experience.

Just a few days ago, the newly created Waste.gov site was hidden behind a password after going live with a default WordPress template. Great going so far, dudes.

The National Park Service has removed all mentions of the words "transgender" and "queer" from its web page dedicated to the Stonewall National Monument, a site that marks a landmark moment for LGBTQ rights quite literally led by transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The site's online hub for the New York visitor centre and park honouring the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a turning point for LGBTQ activism and civil rights in America, now only makes reference to "LGB civil rights," omitting the T and Q representing transgender and queer people in the acronym.

The changes come after anti-LGBTQ executive orders signed by President Donald Trump upon his inauguration, one stating that the federal government now only recognises two sexes, male and female, which medical and legal experts have criticised for biological inaccuracy and ignorance of sexual and gender diversity, and erasure of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people in America. The Trump administration has been systematically erasing LGBTQ mentions and content from the White House website and federal agency websites.

SEE ALSO: Resources for people worried about Trump's anti-LGBTQ executive orders

Using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, Mashable can see the NPS' Stonewall National Monument site has been updated within the last two days.

Here's what it used to look like on Feb. 12:

Credit: Mashable screenshot: National Park Service

And here's what it looks like after Feb. 13:

Credit: Mashable screenshot: National Park Service

The removal of mentions of transgender and queer people from the NPS' Stonewall National Monument website marks a dark, infuriating, unjust day for LGBTQ rights and representation in America. It's a cruel, calculated move that quite literally erases transgender and queer people from a site dedicated to a historical moment of resistance led by trans people of colour and genderfluid people including Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera.

"This blatant act of erasure not only distorts the truth of our history, but it also dishonors the immense contributions of transgender individuals — especially transgender women of color — who were at the forefront of the Stonewall Riots and the broader fight for LGBTQ+ rights," said organisers at NYC non-profit Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and the Stonewall Inn (which is physically part of the National Monument) in a statement.

"This decision to erase the word ‘transgender’ is a deliberate attempt to erase our history and marginalize the very people who paved the way for many victories we have achieved as a community. It is a direct attack on transgender people, especially transgender women of color, who continue to face violence, discrimination, and erasure at every turn."

"This decision to erase the word ‘transgender’ is a deliberate attempt to erase our history and marginalize the very people who paved the way for many victories we have achieved as a community." - Stonewall Inn Gives Back Initiative and the Stonewall Inn

GLAAD also published a statement, describing the decision as "yet another example of the Trump administration’s blatant attempts to discriminate against and erase the legacies of transgender and queer Americans."

"The Stonewall Uprising – a monumental moment in the fight for LGBTQ rights – would not have happened without the leadership of transgender and gender non-conforming people," the statement continued. "The tireless work of Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, and countless other trans women of color paved the way and continue to inspire us. You can try to erase our history, but we will never forget those who came before us and we will continue to fight for all those who will come after us.”

New York Governor Kathy Hochul took to Twitter to call the move "cruel and pettty."

Tweet may have been deleted

"Transgender people play a critical role in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights — and New York will never allow their contributions to be erased," she wrote.

Yellowjackets Melanie Lynskey and Sophie Nélisse reveal the depths of Shauna's rage and how much deeper it gets in Season 3.

The first two episodes ofYellowjackets Season 3 are now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime, with new episodes weekly.

Last summer, Tinder announced Photo Selector, an AI tool to help pick out the best pictures for your dating app profile. But privacy experts warn that there may be risks associated with the tool.

Photo Selector works by taking a photo of yourself for facial recognition and allowing Tinder to see your photo roll. If you consent to this feature, Tinder gets access to your biometric data (unique physical characteristics in the selfie), and access to your on-device photos. What happens next?

SEE ALSO: Beware of AI tools being advertised on Facebook. They could be malware in disguise. Tinder's use of biometric (and other) data

The good news is, there are some privacy positives about this feature. One, as Tinder explains in its Photo Selector FAQ, is that the feature works on-device. This means that it doesn't take your photos to an external or cloud drive.

As for your biometric data, Tinder states in the FAQ that, "Tinder doesn't collect, store, access or otherwise receive any biometrics generated from your selfie video, profile photo, or photos on your camera roll. Instead, everything takes place entirely on your device, and all biometric data used as part of this feature is deleted from your device once you exit the feature."

Tinder also doesn't collect (store) all the photos on your roll. Rather, it only collects photos that you choose to put on your profile.

Rory Mir, associate director of community organizing at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), told Mashable that the deletion of biometric data after use does mitigate risks associated with sharing this data. Still, dating app users — and people online in general — should always be cautious when sharing sensitive data like this, Mir said.

"You only have one face," they continued. "You don't want your face print to wind up in a server permanently and [be] used against you in another context." 

Sharing biometrics is currently an opt-in, consent-driven feature at Tinder. The EFF fights for strong privacy protections like this in the private business sector: The ability for consumers to choose to opt-in, that the collection of this data is limited for its intended purpose, and that users can withdraw at any time. (EFF also fights for government use to be fully banned.)

Mir questioned whether Tinder collected metadata or telemetry data, as it wasn't clear in its Privacy Policy. Metadata is "data about the data" — like how many photos are on someone's camera roll — while telemetry data is that of the processes of the app and how it runs. 

A Tinder spokesperson told Mashable that it doesn't collect telemetry data on users using the Photo Selector tool. In terms of metadata, the app collects "limited analytics data." An example the spokesperson gave was that Tinder collects data about how long the tool took to suggest photos, and how many photos were recommended. 

Another general risk Mir identified was the normalization of sharing biometrics. They advised people to avoid sharing biometrics, which would mean avoiding using this feature (and Tinder photo verification using a video selfie). 

What about the Photo Selector AI?

Field chief privacy officer at privacy tech platform Transcend — and former privacy program manager at Tinder — Ron De Jesus said it was notable that Tinder didn't mention whether it trained its Photo Selector AI on user photos in its FAQ.

"There's no mention of how user personal data might be used to enhance or train that AI that's supporting the Photo Selector tool," De Jesus told Mashable. 

In the age of AI, there are concerns that big tech companies like Meta may utilize customer data to train AI models, thus producing generative content based on what humans have put online.

Tinder's spokesperson told Mashable that user photos are not used to train Photo Selector or the algorithms that power it, and that photos are recommended based on Tinder's proprietary algorithms.

This is also good news, especially in the dating app space. Singles share a wealth of their personal data when they use these apps, and sometimes their data is at risk — like when Bumble, Hinge, and other apps had to patch a location vulnerability. Ultimately, dating apps have a great responsibility because of the amount and type of sensitive data they hold, De Jesus said. It seems that, at present, Tinder is mitigating these risks.

UPDATE: Aug. 7, 2024, 2:11 p.m. EDT This story has been corrected from its original version to reflect Ron De Jesus's former title at Tinder.

The Mini is a bite-sized version of The New York Times' revered daily crossword. While the crossword is a lengthier experience that requires both knowledge and patience to complete, The Mini is an entirely different vibe.

With only a handful of clues to answer, the daily puzzle doubles as a speed-running test for many who play it.

So, when a tricky clue disrupts a player's flow, it can be frustrating! If you find yourself stumped playing The Mini — much like with Wordle and Connections — we have you covered.

SEE ALSO: Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more: Play games on Mashable

Here are the clues and answers to NYT's The Mini for Friday, February 14, 2025:

AcrossWhat each knuckle represents in a famous mnemonic device

• The answer is Month.

Best Picture nominee starring Mikey Madison

• The answer is Anora.

Something set on a microwave

• The answer is Timer.

"Here's to love!," e.g.

• The answer is Toast.

Burnt ___ (barbecue tidbits)

• The answer is Ends.

DownNot glossy, as a photo

• The answer is Matte.

Publication with the headline "History Sighs, Repeats Itself," with "The"

• The answer is Onion.

Wanderer

• The answer is Nomad.

Lock of hair

• The answer is Tress.

Comedian Kevin (with a name that's fitting for Valentine's Day)

• The answer is Hart.

If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.

Featured Video For You The Wordle Strategy used by the New York Times' Head of Games

Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.

Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Mini Crossword.