Facebook’s AI Matchmaker

Love in the Age of Data Harvesting

I’ve tried to write this article three times now. Each attempt has ended up like a broken mirror: scattered, mismatched, and vaguely resembling the aftermath of a menty b where you can’t hold onto a single thread of thought.

First draft? I ranted about dating fatigue; how Gen Z quietly despises the apps they’re supposedly glued to. Second draft? I dug into how the big dating companies are bleeding money because their golden demographic has effectively ghosted them: still logging in, but refusing to pay. Even recession signals aren’t saving them; user numbers wobble, while paid subscriptions plummet. It’s a slow-motion collapse dressed up in pastel UX.

But none of it stuck.

Then something slid across my feed and derailed everything: Facebook has an AI matchmaker.

Yes. You read that right. God help us all.

Enter Zuck’s Algorithm of Love

I assumed Bumble would be first. Whitney Wolfe Herd (who left, then dramatically returned as CEO) had AI matchmaking stamped on her 2024 vision board. An AI concierge to handle your awkward banter and guarantee love everlasting. PR releases, puff-piece interviews, the works. Yet nothing tangible emerged.

And then, like clockwork, Zuckerberg saw the headlines, rolled up his sleeves, and said, “Hold my beer.”

Facebook Dating (a thing that apparently already existed, who knew?) has unveiled “Meet Cute,” a feature that lets an algorithm handle the whole awkward swipe ordeal for you. Forget “swipe right.” Big Brother Zuck will do the honours.

Mind #1: Romance as a Service (RaaS)

Why, exactly, are we offloading every shred of our mental and emotional labour to machines? Flirting, conversation, attraction; these are supposed to be human-level awkward, messy, trial-and-error endeavours. Offload them to an AI, and what’s left?

At this rate, I fully expect “Talk to my chatbot” to replace “Talk to the hand.” The black-box algorithm will speak, and we’ll all nod along like obedient extras in some dystopian sitcom.

And for what? These systems aren’t human. They don’t get nuance, vulnerability, or why someone awkwardly tripping over their own joke can be endearing. They’re running souped-up if-else statements wrapped in marketing glitter. Give it a decade or two and we’ll be shocked, shocked!, when the whole house of cards collapses in some disastrous way.

To be fair, though… finding someone who shares your exact weirdness is nearly impossible. I’ve yet to meet another human who can wax lyrical about ergodic literature (House of Leaves changed an entire sub-genre, and Abrams’ Ship of Theseus was a worthy companion piece) while also caring about cassette radios and obscure analog photography. If that’s you, please; my number’s at the bottom.

But still. Outsourcing ourselves to machines is a bad idea. We already have people happily offloading higher cognitive functions to AI (”prompstitutes,” as the internet likes to call them), and the stories of AI-induced psychosis are creeping upward every week. Now we can’t even handle flirting? Now, even human attraction has to be subcontracted out?

What happened to us?

The Awkward Game

I’m not above this, by the way. I am living proof that flirting is an Olympic sport I was never built to compete in. My attempts at romance land somewhere between slapstick and tragedy. But that’s the point. You stumble, you fail, you cringe, and you grow.

That’s the human game. That’s why even though I keep a dating app on my phone, I hate using it. Sometimes I outright refuse. Because if you shortcut your way through one of the most fundamental parts of being human, what exactly are you left with? Connection shouldn’t be frictionless. Love shouldn’t be a lazy, buttonless interface.

Mind #2: The Maybe-Positives

Alright. Let’s be fair. Maybe, maybe, the algorithm will do some good.

Maybe it will actually pair two equally awkward, equally weird people who never would’ve crossed paths otherwise. Maybe it raises the abysmal 3% match-to-date conversion rate to something halfway respectable. Maybe it becomes a tool that cuts through noise and gives a few people genuinely good relationships.

After all, my best relationship came from an app. My worst? From meeting someone in real life. The line between “AI is ruining everything” and “AI might help” is thinner than I want to admit.

But This Is Still Facebook

Let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t charity. This is Facebook. A company that thrives not on your joy, but on your data, your outrage, your loneliness. Every “cute” algorithmic nudge comes at a cost. There’s no free lunch here. There’s just the commodification of your most intimate signals, harvested and packaged into profit.

So yes, you might find your one true love via an algorithm. It might feel like the happy ending of Hang the DJ. But don’t forget the trade-off: your soul, or at least your metadata, sold wholesale to Zuck & Co.

I hope the love is worth the price.