Dating app powerhouse Match Group—the company behind Tinder, Hinge, and OkCupid—recently surveyed U.S. singles to gauge their true feelings about the intersection of artificial intelligence and romance. The findings reveal that most people aren’t keen on AI meddling with every facet of human connection.

Across the industry, dating apps are diving headfirst into AI experimentation. Bumble launched a virtual assistant called Bee, while Tinder has poured so much money into AI tools that it’s actually slowed its hiring. Meanwhile, Hinge’s former CEO stepped down last year to create a new, AI-centric dating app. But Match’s survey of 1,000 people aged 18 to 39 found that 47% of singles view AI’s role in romantic settings negatively.

Attitudes shift depending on how AI is being used. Roughly 40% of singles say they would refuse to date someone who uses an AI companion app, and that number jumps to 51% among women aged 18 to 24. Yet only 12% of that same age group reported using a companion app in the past three months, and just about a third of those users said they were seeking genuine connections with chatbots.

Match notes that while people show “near-universal” disapproval of actually dating an AI—like in the movie *Her*—that doesn’t mean they reject AI features within apps entirely. In fact, 64% of respondents said they could see how AI might assist them in their dating journey. Strictly speaking, every major dating app has used some form of matching algorithm long before GPT models became common. This survey focuses on the latest wave of AI features that nearly every app is now introducing: tools to help users polish their profiles, select photos, and keep conversations flowing.

The key takeaway for dating app developers is that people aren’t completely closed off to AI; they simply don’t want to form relationships with robots or feel that their dating experiences are overwhelmed by inauthentic technology. “Ask singles what they want from AI in dating, and the answer is pretty consistent: help with the hard parts, but hands off for the human parts,” Match wrote in a blog post. “Yes, they’ll use it to help them punch up a profile or for help figuring out what to say when a conversation goes quiet, but the actual connection is still theirs to create.”

Hopefully, this message reaches dating entrepreneurs like Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who once suggested that app users could have personal bots that date other users’ bots. It’s now fairly common to say you met your partner online, but “his bot asked my bot out, and our bots hit it off” will never be a socially acceptable meet-cute.