I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but after learning about Snack’s new tool to help Generation Z and millennials find love, I’m starting to think of dating apps like Tinder as old school.
Snack, one of the newest dating apps, was released in late 2021. It’s aimed squarely at millennials and Gen Z, with a TikTok-like interface. Snack, as the new kid on the dating app block, isn’t afraid to take chances. In 2022, the service introduced a feature that made ghosts vanish into thin air. In light of the widespread problem of “ghosting” in online dating, this function is awesome.
The newest addition to Snack, however, is not exactly cool. Better words than “weird” or “interesting” would be appropriate. That’s because Snack has joined the artificial intelligence bandwagon and started letting people make AI-trained avatars of themselves. Then, these digital representations of you interact with other Snack users in the service’s online dating environment. Your AI-trained avatar will inform you of its findings and let you decide whether or not to initiate a genuine human-to-human conversation if a match is found.
Honestly, I’m at a loss for words here. This is the future we live in, and it is already here. Having your avatar go out and assess potential dates saves you time that would otherwise be spent mindlessly chatting with random people on dating apps, conversations that rarely lead anywhere. In a different sense, it has a dystopian quality, as the human element of a date’s initial encounter has been thrown into chaos.
Make sure your AI avatar is well-trained, though, so that it accurately reflects who you are. Evidently, you tell it information about yourself and then release it into the wild of the internet to act as a clone.
And Snack isn’t finished using avatars powered by AI just yet. Eventually, it hopes that people will use it to go on dates in a metaverse-like virtual world before deciding whether to meet in person. Again, that’s to be applauded from a standpoint of innovation and safety, but it does take the human element out of the introductory stages of dating.
Having said that, I am interested in following the progress of Snack’s AI-trained avatars. It will either be an enormous failure or a revolutionary change in the way people approach to romance. If the latter is true, it’s further proof that AI will permeate every aspect of our lives sooner than we realize.
