Grindr reportedly plans to introduce “AI boyfriends” to sext with you when nobody else will

Get ready because Grindr is about to get even better… or worse… depending on how you look at it, and how you feel about artificial intelligence.

After announcing recently that it was hoping to shift away from hookups and casual encounters by adding features “focused on long-term dating, travel, and professional networking,” the popular dating app says it’s also aiming to provide “AI wingmen” to users in the near future.

Bloomberg first reported on the plans a few months ago, saying Grindr was partnering with Ex-human Inc., a provider of generative artificial intelligence tools, to create a tool that could “recommend a restaurant to take a date to or select music based on a person’s profile that they might find aphrodisiacal if and when they come up for a drink.”

“If we don’t do it, someone else will,” Grindr CEO George Arison said back in December. “If you’re not first to market with something in AI, you’re going to miss out.”

Now, Platformer reports the app, which has had a chokehold on the queer community since its launch in 2009, is thinking about taking the AI wingman concept even further by creating “AI boyfriends” that will “engage in sexually explicit conversations with users” when they can’t find an actual living breathing human to talk dirty to them late at night on the app.

Think of it sorta like an old school 1-900 number, but cheaper and powered by ChatGBT instead of a poor college student trying to make a little extra cash to pay for their books and living expenses.

Per Platformer:

Grindr is currently revising its terms of service to ask people explicitly if the company can train its AI models on their personal data, which could include direct messages, Platformer has learned. 

This information will likely be used to train another paid product: an AI boyfriend based on Ex-human technology that can sext, flirt, and maintain an ongoing relationship with paid users. The AI boyfriend is in the early stages of development, according to employees with direct knowledge of the project. 

The news may unsettle Grindr users, who until now have been able to assume that the often explicit DMs they send there will always remain private. But it appears that Grindr will ask permission before it moves forward training its AI products on them. 

According to Grindr employees, however, the “AI boyfriend” has been challenging to build because, like most AI tools, the bot has proven to be pretty racist and tends to make problematic remarks about Jews and Muslims, in particular.

Considering it pulls its data from existing Grindr chats, however, this likely isn’t a huge surprise for too many people. We can only imagine what the bot has to say about “fats” and “femmes.”

The app is notorious for bringing out the absolute worst in people, especially when it comes to topics around race and identity, although the company has taken meaningful steps to curb this problem in recent years.

No word yet on when Grindr plans to launch its AI boyfriends, but we’ll be sure to keep you posted. In the meantime, how do you feel about sexting with a chatbot? Sound off in the comments below…