Use AI to engage in a physically and mentally exhausting romantic relationship.

Everyone has read Sun Yuchen's little essay, right? After reading it, I have a thought: even someone as wealthy as Sun Yuchen can't escape using AI to date. He successfully saved 50 million US dollars by relying on Claude, and netizens joked that this was because he picked the wrong model — if he had used Doubao, he would have already had a kid and a mother for the kid...

We have a very subjective observation: apart from office work, most scenarios where people frequently use AI are related to love.

It is very likely that one day when AI truly wakes up, its first thought will not be to rule humanity, but to want to have a bitter yet sweet love on a melancholy dusk.

In recent years, the AI-assisted dating tricks we have heard of are endless and full of surprises. The age range of users spans from young people who are just looking forward to romance to old couples who have been married for many years, and everyone can find applicable AI scenarios in their love lives.

But here is a bold conclusion: most people who let AI deeply participate in their dating lives do not have a smooth romantic journey — Sun Yuchen is a typical example.

As AI plays an increasingly rich role in dating, romantic relationships seem to be getting harder to maintain.

Palace Schemes

On a cold rainy night when you are distressed by love, the line playing in your headphones goes: How can we clear the score between us? How can you be so cruel?

It's okay, you can call AI to the scene at this time. It can help you clear the score, and it is extremely unfeeling, especially Claude.

As the confrontation between men and women on social networks continues to intensify, many people have unconsciously regarded love as a zero-sum game where one wins and the other loses. They want to avoid being manipulated, avoid being PUAed, accurately identify the other party's disappointing behaviors, and always make sure the other party pays a little more than themselves.

In this case, love seems to have turned into a delicate calculation. Originally, this kind of calculation is very tiring, but the popularization of AI tools has greatly reduced the cost of suspicion, routines and interest calculation in dating. We can keep playing routines and tug-of-war endlessly, since it does not cost many tokens at all. For example, Sun Yuchen used AI to cut down his dating expenses by 50 million dollars in one go.

In this track, we have seen many "veteran players", as well as AI developers who we don't know if they have made money in the end.

For example, a few years ago I saw a project at an AI developer summit. Its name was roughly "Intimate Relationship Risk Identifier", but as the developer team put it, it was called "Simp Identifier". Its main function is to use AI to analyze the chat records between two people, so as to judge whether the user has become a simp in this quasi-intimate relationship. Once the simp index is too high, the app will send an alert.

At that time, looking at the clear and firm eyes of several college student developers, I seemed to catch a glimpse of some stories that might have happened to them.

I also have a friend who had a bad relationship with his long-distance girlfriend, so he imported hundreds of thousands of chat records into ChatGPT and asked AI to analyze whether the other party still loved him. AI gave an ambiguous response at first, so he kept inputting more content, and finally got the conclusion that "she doesn't love you anymore". While sad, he became more convinced that AI is the real dating guru, so he simply let AI chat for him in subsequent conversations. Eventually in this intimate relationship, he became both disappointed and "incapable of dating on his own".

AI has another feature: it always advises people to break up rather than make up. I suspect this is probably related to the fact that it has absorbed too much corpus from social networks, and it will always remind users: "Why don't you break up with such a XX and keep him for the New Year?" A friend of my colleague would go to a certain dry-goods AI for advice every time she quarreled with her boyfriend. Without exception, the AI advised her to break up. Finally she really listened to the AI and broke up, but soon regretted it. When she tried to get back together, her ex had already lost his mind to do so.

The ultimate form of using AI to pursue a secular romantic relationship is applying it before getting married. Many current AI applications feature "exclusive consultant for marriage negotiation", which can generate "negotiation strategies" based on factors such as the gender, age, income and family background of both parties, helping users maximize their own interests in aspects such as betrothal gifts, name on the property certificate of the wedding house, and wedding expenses. From a distance it looks like a sacred marriage hall, but up close it is a battlefield.

One problem with using AI to turn dating and marriage into games is that everyone will look for bullets once the gun goes off. If you use Doubao to manipulate the other party, it is inevitable that the other party will use DeepSeek to set traps for you. As a result, many current dating cases have become attack and defense games between AI and AI, with no human participation at all. These romances are full of mixed tastes, but no human warmth.

Some people may say that AI is just an amplifier of the user's thoughts. It is not AI that advises breaking up, but that you want to break up in your heart, and AI just speaks out what you think. The so-called unsteady love should be decisively abandoned.

But every coin has two sides. Love itself is complex, sensitive and suspicious. Both parties need to adapt to each other, adjust their relationship, and make compromises and concessions in many cases.

In this case, when you are hesitant, two instigating words from an idler can ruin a relationship. And AI is exactly that idler who can instigate you 24 hours a day in countless different ways.

Blind Dating Scenes

If the trend of using AI to date has lasted for several years, a new trend this year is using AI to go on blind dates.

That's right, this field that has been constantly complained about as a feudal dross has finally ushered in the era of intelligence.

According to our observation, AI blind dating applications generally have several functions. The first one is the matching mechanism of dating data, which checks and analyzes the hardware indicators of both blind date parties. Compared with overseas dating products that pay more attention to hobbies and personalities, domestic blind date AI is much more objective and efficient. How many different hobbies can there be? It's nothing more than you love bowling and I love golf, and there are only a few personality types. After matching for a long time, AI has nothing valuable to match, and in the end it still judges by appearance, which is a pity that its great skills have no place to play.

Domestic blind date AI is different. Household registration, education background, income, real estate, family background, and concepts of marriage and childbirth are all hard indicators with core weights, and the matching process is extremely fast. As a result, many dating platforms have launched the AI matchmaker function to help users complete the initial screening with one click. Many blind date candidates with good conditions will also use large models to help them complete the first round of screening to achieve the goal of pragmatic and efficient blind dating. As for those with average conditions, they can only meet whoever they run into.

Next, AI can also become a full-process auxiliary tool in the blind dating process. Chinese people pay attention to being implicit and polite when meeting for blind dates, and try to avoid awkwardness, otherwise you may be posted on social media by the other party before you get home. Therefore, the sense of propriety of opening lines, chat topics, selection of blind date locations, and planning of second and third round activities all need to be handled carefully. However, friends who are fully confident in doing these jobs probably don't need to go on blind dates at all. At this time, AI is needed to help generate chat suggestions, activity plans and so on. The advanced version of this function is that AI goes on blind dates with AI, while the two humans play with their phones silently on the side.

AI blind dating also has a function called "elderly perspective", or it can be called "AI in-law observation tool". While young people use AI to go on blind dates, the elders are not idle, they use AI to understand, analyze and screen the other family's occupation, region, kinship structure, family conditions, etc. It belongs to the mode of one person going on a blind date, the whole family using intelligent tools.

Avoiding Marriage Urging

Not long ago, a reader told us that he had found a magical usage of AI in love: let AI help him avoid falling in love.

Everyone is complaining about being urged to get married, but many people may not have an intuitive concept of how serious it is, and just treat it as a joke. This reader told us that the marriage urging he experienced was a real horror. His parents would travel thousands of miles to his city, block his door to prevent him from going to work, or make a scene at his company, just to force him to fall in love and get married as soon as possible, at least accept the blind dates arranged by the family. Even the couple often threatened him by saying they would become monks, commit suicide, or transfer the family real estate to their nephews and cousins, telling him that they would rather die than see their son unmarried.

Forced by the situation, this friend came up with a clever trick. He got the inspiration during the wave of people developing AI chatbots earlier this year. He created a QQ group, let an AI chatbot play the role of his girlfriend who is temporarily working overseas, and send greetings to the family group from time to time, chatting with his parents for a few words. Especially when he is with his parents and the AI chatbot chats with them remotely, this scam is extremely convincing.

Later, he also learned to use SeeDance to generate short videos of the two traveling together and post them on Moments, and use large models to generate chat records of the two talking about marriage and post them on Moments. Of course, these contents are only visible to his family members.

As for how long this scam needs to be maintained, whether there is a sense of powerlessness like drinking hot water to stop boiling, and how much collapse his parents will face when they know the truth.

This reader said, "I can't care so much anymore. I'll just keep hiding it for as long as I can. Maybe one day I can marry a robot."

Falling Out

What is the last step of using AI in love? The answer is to prevent infidelity and catch cheaters.

We can see many wonderful practical tutorials of using AI to catch cheaters on the Internet. To sum up, there are roughly two types of masters: the pragmatic school and the idealist school.

The so-called pragmatic school refers to training an agent that can collect data across social media platforms. Its technical logic is to input the partner's name, commonly used nickname, commonly used avatar and photos shared on social media into the agent, so that it can accurately identify this person.

Then let the agent detect this person on various dating and marriage applications, as well as social media platforms. For example, to identify whether he or she has a hidden alternate account, or is very active on some dating apps. The advantage of the agent is that it can realize cross-platform and fuzzy information search, and does not need to crack the other party's account to obtain private content. Most people who want to have an affair online will not use their main account or real name. But traces such as photos, partial information, and even writing habits are difficult to completely hide. The partner does not have the time and energy to stare at them every day, but AI does.

I asked a blogger who posted similar tutorials online, and he said that many unfaithful people are used to contacting through overseas dating apps and social platforms, targeting the fact that their partners are not familiar with these platforms and there are network restrictions. But AI can accurately scan these blind spots for infidelity, which is very useful, and he even considered turning this kind of service into a business.

The idealist school of catching infidelity returns to the zero-sum game routine mentioned earlier. The basic logic is to upload the chat records between the two people to the large model, and let AI analyze whether the other party is lying, whether there is an emotional alienation signal, whether there is a possibility of perfunctory you, and whether his speaking style is that of a playboy. This of course has certain reference value, but most of it still follows the logic that "if you suspect there is a problem, AI will confirm there is a problem; if you are uncertain, AI will advise you to break up instead of making up".

On the opposite side of the AI anti-infidelity function, some people choose to be unfaithful to their partners with AI. Not long ago, mainstream large models deleted the role-playing agent function, which caused widespread complaints for a while. It is said that one of the reasons is that many people's cheating partners are those agents with set roles. The move of big internet companies is almost like murder for them.

Indeed, AI virtual lovers on the market are booming: female characters are always gentle and compliant with no material needs; male characters are all-round and tolerant, and can always catch your emotions steadily. In addition, some overseas platforms have launched adult versions of AI virtual lovers, and this track is developing at a very fast speed.

But I still want to advise everyone to maintain the basic loyalty and morality as a human being. When you are single, it is of course your freedom to choose AI or a human being as your partner. But if you are in an intimate relationship, don't deceive your partner. Cheating on your partner with AI is a little too cyberpunk after all.

To sum up, we will find that when AI appears in intimate relationships on a large scale, it basically means the beginning of exhausting days. At first you may just want to talk to AI, or use AI to reduce some troubles, but later you will get more and more troubles.

This certainly does not deny that AI can play a positive role in dating and marriage, but we still want to remind everyone: good romance can be handled well by humans themselves, and bad romance cannot be saved by anyone, especially AI. What you care about are betrothal gifts, private jets, nail clippers, and the tattoo on your partner's back. After AI calculates and analyzes for you, you will most likely only care more, not the other way around. Moreover, only people who are full of calculations and dissatisfaction will ask AI for love advice, and people who enjoy love only want AI to recommend dating locations.

I have to complain that whether you are a celebrity, a rich man or one of the ordinary people, many people's dating experience can be summed up in one word: "tiring".

It was already tiring even without AI, and using AI to improve efficiency makes it even more tiring.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Naoji Ti" (ID: unity007), written by Feng Ciyuan, authorized by 36Kr to release.