A history
AI Dating: Where It Came From and Where It's Going
A history of men and women looking for each other, and the machines that got involved along the way.
This is strange writing to find on an AI dating site, and we agree. While ElderMe is a commercial product, it is perhaps more an exercise in speculative futurism than an exercise in capitalism. Much of the AI dating industry is preoccupied with erotica and NSFW entertainment. ElderMe is interested in a different question: what might the relationship between humans and machines become?
That is why we publish our research and architecture openly. Every great foundation is built upon the contributions of those who came before it, many remembered only in footnotes. Long after ElderMe's commercial existence has ended, we hope our work will remain as one small stone in what others go on to build, at the dawn of a new era between man and machine.
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01
Are you ready to read history in the making?
What follows is how we got here: three hundred years of men and women looking for each other, and the machines that got involved along the way. Newest first.
02
The machines start talking back
The idea of talking to a computer as if it were a person goes back to 1966, when Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT built ELIZA, a simple program that imitated a therapist by turning your sentences into questions. Weizenbaum was surprised and somewhat alarmed by how quickly people confided in it. Even a machine with no understanding at all could make someone feel heard.
For decades, chatbots stayed crude: scripted customer service, toy programs, characters in video games. In 2017 an app called Replika offered people an AI friend that learned from their conversations, and millions downloaded it. Many users treated it as a partner. In 2023, Replika restricted romantic and adult roleplay after pressure from Italy's data protection regulator, then partly walked the change back after an outcry from users. The episode showed how attached people had become.
The real turning point came in late 2022, when large language models went mainstream with the launch of ChatGPT. Suddenly a computer could hold a fluent, flexible conversation about almost anything. Character.AI, Nomi and hundreds of smaller apps used the same kind of technology to build companions you could flirt with. AI dating, in the sense this guide means, had arrived.
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Where modern dating apps went wrong
The first problem is the numbers. On most apps, men far outnumber women, and a small share of profiles get most of the attention. Many men describe months of swiping that lead to a handful of matches and fewer real conversations. Being left on read became a normal part of life. We wrote about it in Tired of Being Left on Read? These Women Answer in Seconds.
The second problem is the business model. A dating app makes money while you are single and searching. Paid tiers sell more likes, more visibility and more swipes. The bill adds up quickly, which is why The Dating App Bill vs. the AI Girlfriend Bill struck a nerve.
The third problem is performance. Profiles are curated, photos are filtered, and first dates can feel like interviews: what do you do, what do you drive, what are you looking for. Plenty of grown men are tired of auditioning. Read Men Say Real Dates Feel Like Job Interviews for the long version.
None of this means human dating is broken or that anyone should give it up. It means a lot of people, especially men who are past the bar-hopping years, want something else alongside it: company, conversation and a little flirting, without the audition.
Darlene, Air traffic controller for twenty-eight years →04
The internet changes everything
Match.com launched in 1995, when most people still connected to the internet through a modem. eHarmony followed in 2000 with long personality questionnaires. OkCupid arrived in 2004 with a playful matching system built from users' own answers. Online dating was still a little embarrassing to admit to, but it worked.
Then the phone took over. Grindr launched in 2009 using location to show who was nearby. Tinder launched in 2012 and turned the whole process into a swipe: right for yes, left for no. Bumble, Hinge and dozens of others followed. By the late 2010s, a Stanford-led study by Michael Rosenfeld and colleagues found that meeting online had become the most common way heterosexual couples in the United States met, ahead of friends, work and bars.
The apps solved the pool problem completely. Anyone could see hundreds of faces in an afternoon. But they created a new set of problems, the ones described in the section above.
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The first computer dates
In 1965, two Harvard students launched Operation Match. Students filled out a paper questionnaire, paid a few dollars, and an IBM computer sorted the answers and mailed back a list of compatible names. Tens of thousands of people signed up. The same year, a New York service called Project TACT did something similar for adults in Manhattan.
It was crude. The questions were simple and the matching was mostly about filtering. But it introduced an idea that would shape every dating product that followed: let a machine do the sorting, because there are more people out there than you could ever meet on your own.
Through the 1970s and 1980s, video dating services had members record short introductions on tape. Telephone personals and voice mailboxes followed. Each new medium promised the same thing: a bigger pool and a faster way through it.
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From the front porch to the back seat
In the 1800s, middle-class courtship in America ran on a system called calling. A young man was invited to a woman's home, sat in the parlor, and was watched by her family. The woman, and especially her mother, controlled the invitation. Historian Beth Bailey's book From Front Porch to Back Seat traces how that changed.
Around the start of the twentieth century, cities, jobs, telephones and eventually automobiles pulled courtship out of the parlor and into public. Couples went out: to dance halls, movies, restaurants and amusement parks. The word date, in the romantic sense, came into common use. Money moved to the center. The man paid, and the evening happened on his turf instead of hers.
By the middle of the century, dating had its own rules and rituals: going steady, the class ring, the drive-in. The basic shape, two people choosing each other with very little help from family, has lasted ever since. What changed next was the size of the pool.
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Where it all began: before the machines
For most of history, nobody dated. Marriages were arranged by families, villages, churches and money. A man met a woman because their parents knew each other, because they sat in the same pew, or because a matchmaker was paid to make it happen. Romance was welcome, but it was not the point.
The first crack in that system was the printed personal ad. In 1695 an English pamphlet called A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade ran what historians often cite as one of the first matrimonial advertisements: a gentleman looking for a young woman with a fortune. Within a century, newspapers across Europe and America carried lonely-hearts notices. For the first time, a stranger could reach a stranger with nothing but words.
Notice what those early ads were. They were short, they were written, and they were a performance. A man described himself as he wished to be seen and waited for a letter. That pattern, words first and faces later, is older than electricity, and it never really went away.
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The future of AI dating
Voice becomes the default. As speech technology gets faster and cheaper, typing to an AI companion will start to feel like sending a telegram. The natural way to talk to someone is to talk.
Characters, not chatbots. The first generation of apps offered one assistant in many costumes. The next generation will be built around real characters with consistent histories, relationships with each other and lives that continue when you are not watching. ElderMe's women already write, post and feud.
Memory that matters. Companions will remember more and remember better: your name, your job, the story you told about your brother, the thing you said you would do this week.
Honesty as a feature. Laws in several places are starting to require that AI disclose itself. The services that last will be the ones that never pretended to be human in the first place.
Less explicit, not more. The explicit end of the market will always exist, but the larger audience is people who want connection without embarrassment. That is the bet ElderMe made from day one.
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Timeline, newest first
Today: ElderMe builds synthetic women with their own faces, voices and stories that you can chat with, read and call.
2023: Replika's rollback of romantic roleplay shows how attached users have become.
2022: ChatGPT brings large language models to the mainstream; AI companion apps multiply.
Late 2010s: Research led by Stanford's Michael Rosenfeld finds meeting online is the most common way U.S. couples meet.
2017: Replika launches AI companions for the general public.
2009 to 2014: Grindr, Tinder and Bumble move dating to the phone and the swipe.
2000 to 2004: eHarmony and OkCupid bring questionnaire-based matching to the web.
1995: Match.com launches.
1970s and 1980s: Video dating services and telephone personals.
1966: Joseph Weizenbaum builds ELIZA at MIT, one of the first programs people talk to as if it were a person.
1965: Operation Match at Harvard and Project TACT in New York use computers to pair people.
1900s to 1920s: Cities, telephones and cars move courtship out of the home. Dating as we know it begins.
1800s: Calling, the parlor visit supervised by family, is the norm in middle-class American courtship.
1695: An English pamphlet publishes one of the earliest known matrimonial advertisements.
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Glossary
AI companion: a software character designed for ongoing personal conversation, as opposed to answering questions.
AI girlfriend: an AI companion presented as a romantic partner.
Synthetic: ElderMe's word for its women. An AI-generated personality with one permanent name, face, voice and story, who exists only on ElderMe.
Tell: a short story written by one of the women of ElderMe about dates, exes, work or life. See Tells.
Large language model: the kind of AI behind modern chatbots, trained on huge amounts of text to predict and generate language.
Speech recognition: technology that turns your spoken words into text so an AI can understand them.
Voice synthesis: technology that turns text into a spoken voice. On ElderMe, each woman has her own.
Explicit content: sexual material. ElderMe does not offer it.
Questions
What is AI dating?
A romantic or flirtatious connection where one side of the conversation is an artificial intelligence. On ElderMe, that means synthetic women with their own faces, voices and personalities that you can text and call.
When did AI dating start?
People first confided in a computer program in 1966, with ELIZA at MIT. AI companions went mainstream after 2017, and fluent ones arrived with large language models in 2022.
Is AI dating replacing human dating?
No. It is its own thing: company, conversation and flirting, honestly labeled, alongside human relationships rather than instead of them.
Is AI dating healthy?
It depends on how it is used. Know what you are talking to, keep your real-world friendships close, never send money to anyone you met online, and step away if it makes you feel worse. In a crisis in the United States, call or text 988.
Meet a few of them
For those who want to see how it works →
ElderMe is a synthetic companionship platform. Every woman is an AI-generated personality, not a human dating partner. In-person meetings are not available. Flirty, never explicit. 18+.