Once upon a time, when Facebook was used for something other than snooping on the lives of your old schoolfriends or selling a second-hand bed frame, the ‘relationship status’ option actually mattered. In David Fincher’s 2010 film The Social Network, it’s depicted as a key factor in the platform’s early, viral success. Now, CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants to actually change your relationship status itself. With AI!

Facebook’s parent company, Meta, announced the AI-themed update to its Facebook Dating app on Monday (September 22). The so-called ‘dating assistant’ aims to help people “avoid swipe fatigue” and help people connect with new romantic prospects, and is rolled out alongside another feature called ‘meet cute’.

What does any of this actually mean? Well, the ‘dating assistant’ is basically a chatbot that you can prompt to find – in theory – the future love of your life. To illustrate this idea, Meta gives a handy example: “You can write ‘Find me a Brooklyn girl in tech’ and the dating assistant will help you with your search.” God only knows what those ‘optimise your life in five easy prompts’ guys will do when they get their hands on this technology.

‘Meet cute’, on the other hand, promises to “take the indecision out of online dating” by… outsourcing your preferences, and red flags, to The Machine. Basically, it will present you with surprise matches made by its “personalised matching algorithm” on a weekly basis, or maybe more (the company is still playing with the idea of different frequencies). Because if Zuck is already stealing all your data, why not use it to solve that favourite tech bro disaster scenario: the declining birth rate?

According to Facebook, hundreds of thousands of 18 to 29-year-olds sign up to use its dating service every month, with young adult matches up 10 per cent year-on-year. If you think that adding AI matchmakers into the mix sounds pretty dystopian, then you’re probably not wrong. But it’s also, arguably, the logical conclusion of reducing our dating lives to a bunch of data-friendly categories, text messages, and jpegs. If only there was an AI that could remind us that every human being contains multitudes, and there is love to be found in the unlikeliest of places... but even then, some tech bro would find a way to fold it into their multibillion-dollar empire. Maybe dating is doomed, after all.