After years of shrinking usage and tumbling stock prices, the dating app Bumble is teasing a major change to its product. But in solving one problem, it might be walking right into another. The company told Axios this month that it’s getting rid of a dating app mainstay: the swipe. The feature made it easy for people to carelessly flick through photos, said CEO Whitney Wolfe Herd, leading to a user experience with too many dead-end conversations. Going forward, Bumble will focus on features that make for deeper, more meaningful connections, she said. Namely, an AI assistant named “Bee”.
While it’s still unclear exactly what Bee will do, its responsibilities will include punching up users’ profiles by suggesting better options for their photos and personal blurbs. Bumble says it will also use AI to chat with people about their dating preferences and help them find others with similar “values”.
Bumble – known, when it was launched, for its women’s-empowerment angle, as the only major dating app that didn’t allow men to initiate private messages – is in a pickle, and it’s not alone. Consumer tech companies are being told by consultants and Silicon Valley types that to succeed, they’ll have to integrate AI into their products, and quickly. Failing to do so could land them in hot water with investors, who expect companies to keep growing indefinitely.
But, doing so sloppily could alienate consumers. Recent attempts by dating apps and their users to weave generative AI into courtship have had dubious results. Rizz, an app named after gen-Z slang for “charisma”, promises to help users woo romantic partners by replacing real interactions with AI-generated responses. It has a flood of positive app store reviews from users claiming that Rizz has helped them fool unsuspecting partners.
When Tinder rolled out an AI-powered “game” in 2025 that claimed to help people hone their flirting skills, I tested it for the Washington Post. Speaking out loud into my phone’s microphone, I flirted my way through a series of interactions with AI-generated men. When I was polite, the app encouraged me to be less chilly. When I poked fun, I lost points for being “quirky” – a good reminder that AI systems will replicate whatever strange or unfair dynamics they find in their training data.
Some dating app users have found themselves plagued by AI paranoia, unsure whether the people they’re messaging are relying on a chatbot to sound charming. The internet is teeming with allegations of AI-generated pickup lines, breakup texts and marriage vows.
The story of Bumble is the story of consumer tech more broadly. A generation of millennial entrepreneurs were told that all it takes to tackle thorny systemic issues is an app with cute branding and an investor-friendly value proposition. “Democratisation” and “convenience” were the joint north stars, with startups rushing to iron the friction out of everything from ordering takeout to finding a romantic partner.
But as life became increasingly frictionless, it started to feel like a long slide into meaninglessness. Young professionals began to realise that while they could afford endless on-demand dinner delivery, their chances of paying off college debt or owning a home were evaporating. Millions of young singles found that, actually, the limitless choice dating apps promised was making them more lonely than ever. Almost 80% of dating app users say they have been “emotionally, mentally or physically exhausted” at some point when using the services, according to a 2024 survey by Forbes.
How could something less difficult make us more burned out? Maybe because the intermittent dopamine spikes of app dating were no replacement for the rich, impossible process of learning who we are and how we love.
Now, companies such as Bumble are reckoning with the impossibility of what they promised: the joys of sex and romance at the swipe of a finger. Ditching the swipe and hyping AI might sound great on an investor report, but it won’t fix the problems that make modern dating so joyless, if the goal is still to offer the user a smooth, mindless path toward connection.
Then there are the broader issues – growing social alienation, the decline of marriage and the mainstream-ification of online misogyny – that are too complex for an app with a bumblebee logo to wrangle.
Our friction-free lives failed to make us happier, so now tech executives are pitching a new solution: maybe if we let AI take the wheel, this will all get less depressing. I wonder when we’ll learn to stop listening.
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