Your digital double will go on dates for you: AI is about to change the way we fall in love forever

AI digital twins could soon go on first dates on our behalf. But delegating to machines the very experiences that define us raises a philosophical question with no easy answer.

In a few years, it may no longer be necessary to survive a terrible first date, those silences that hang in the air like lead, or those conversations that fizzle out after three exchanges. A digital version of yourself will go instead, an AI digital twin trained to know you better than you probably know yourself. This is not the plot of a Black Mirror episode. It is the concrete trajectory of the AI sector as applied to romantic relationships, and the journey has already been underway for some time.

Today, dozens of applications use artificial intelligence for matching between people, attempting to identify compatibility at scale through algorithms that analyse preferences, behaviours and linguistic patterns. But the real breakthrough of recent months concerns an even more sophisticated category of tools: conversational dating assistants. Until recently, apps made the match and then left the rest to the user. That is no longer the case. There are already applications where all you need to do is share a screenshot of a conversation to receive suggestions on what to write, how to respond, and what tone to use. The AI writes for you, more or less.

The next step, already in experimental stages according to several reports from the tech sector, involves digital twins meeting virtually before the real people ever sit across from each other at a table. Two digital replicas, each trained on their respective user's data, conduct a simulated first date. At the end, a compatibility score is calculated. Only if that number exceeds a certain threshold do the real people actually meet. Efficiency wins. Chaos eliminated. Risk zeroed out.

And yet it is precisely here that the issue stops being technological and becomes something else entirely. For centuries we have used tools to extend our physical and cognitive abilities: doing calculations, storing information, finding our way. Now we are beginning to delegate something radically different. We are entrusting to machines experiences that until recently we considered the beating heart of human existence: getting to know someone, searching for the right words, feeling that inexplicable spark that follows no logic whatsoever.

The problem, if we want to call it that, is that machines are extraordinarily good at simulating. They will become increasingly skilled at faking empathy, warmth, and intuition. But feelings, in the authentic sense of the word, remain beyond their reach and will likely remain so permanently, as researchers such as Gary Marcus, one of the most clear-eyed critics of contemporary AI, have consistently argued, and as reports from the AI Now Institute, which has been monitoring the social impacts of artificial intelligence for years, make abundantly clear. (Source: AI Now Institute Annual Report 2025; Gary Marcus, "Rebooting AI", Pantheon Books)

And so it is worth pausing on a question that no algorithm can resolve: much of what we become is born precisely in inefficient experiences. In the wrong silences. In the mistakes. In the embarrassing moments. In the broken heart. These are moments that no optimisation system would ever choose to include in a process, yet they are exactly the ones that transform us most, that teach us who we are and what we truly want.

Delegating this part of ourselves to machines is not merely a technological choice. It is an anthropological one. And perhaps, before optimising everything, it is worth asking whether every inefficiency is really a problem to be solved, or whether sometimes it is precisely there, in imperfection and uncertainty, that meaning hides.