Chatbots.

All of a sudden, ChatGPT is dominating the news cycle. And as a dating coach, everyone’s asking me: “Should I use a chatbot for dating?”

I know it’s tempting, as people are using them for everything from travel itineraries to drafting cover letters.

But my answer is a hard “No.”

Dating is a personal and emotional experience. While a chatbot may be able to converse with your matches, it just can’t yet actually sound like, joke like, and be interested in the same things as YOU.

If you’re in it for laughs, ChatGPT can certainly come up with some weird conversation starters, as this Slate reporter discovered.
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But chatbots are limited in their capabilities. For one, they can’t pick up on subtle nuances in others’ speech, so they’ll lead conversations to bizarre and sometimes unsettling places.

Counterintuitively, they also require mountains of guidance and your own creativity.

If you ask ChatGPT to give you some pick-up lines lines for online dating, they’re going to be as generic (and therefore unusable) as they come.

Obviously, these are a no-go 😂

The key to getting interesting output from ChatGPT is to give incredibly specific directives, like this:

For reference, I had to adjust and hone what I was asking for 6 times(!) before getting a usable response.

So to me, the brainpower required to creatively hone your specifications to a chatbot in order to get a usable conversation starter is 10x the amount needed to write a friendly and thoughtful comment about someone’s profile yourself.

Frankly, I don’t think it’s worth the immense amount of time required to direct ChatGPT to come up with something interesting to say to each match in a way that sounds like who you actually are.

You are busy! The time you carve out in your day for dating apps should be spent maximizing your matches and dates, not fretting over how to make a computer speak in your own unique voice.
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Instead of turning to AI, try this:

1) As soon as you match with someone, dash off a quick thing you have in common with them from their profile, and end with a question.

• Establish real, human connection by mentioning your shared interest
• Give them the easiest way to respond by asking a question
• Act right away so the match doesn’t linger in your queue – you’ll put too much pressure on yourself to send the perfect thing the longer you wait!

2) Use the 30 opening lines you get from Profile In An Hour!

• These 30 lines all came from people on the SMP team (aka real humans), and they’ve all gotten us responses
• Use the ones that pique YOUR interest, so you wind up in a conversation that’s fun, interesting, and in line with your sense of humor. Your match will pick up on your enthusiasm.
• Send them as is, or tweak them to your voice! They’re there to get you started – it’s so much easier to put your own spin on an existing conversation idea rather than to stare down a blank page

Save yourself the headache (and eeriness) of ChatGPT, and remember that it’s not an authority.

Dating advice and guidance should come from someone whose style and attitude you trust, not from a bot that’s cobbled together its advice from all the wide-ranging corners of the internet.

And hopefully, that expert you trust is me!

Check out Profile In An Hour for more (human) advice on opening lines, how to keep a conversation flowing on a dating app, plus bio hacks, photo checklists, and more.

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