Finding Love Does Cost A Thing: Why GenAI Can’t Find You a Soulmate

Content Disclaimer: GenAI was used to generate responses and images pertaining to prompts.

Source: WIX Media

Can GenAI find modern daters a soulmate? For some, the answer may be obvious: no. For others, their answer may be more hopeful. My answer is the former. I'll explain why.

Intrigued and puzzled by stories about people who have relationships with chatbots (Stuart Heritage 2025; Tracy Follows 2025; Efua Andoh 2026; Rhiannon Williams 2025) or who use AI dating apps (Aisha Down 2026), I wanted to explore this question by setting out to do three things:

1. Use GenAI tools by "asking" for advice on finding a soulmate (responses cut for length)

2. Ask AI if it understands what a soulmate is

3. Give an AI image generator specific traits I am looking for in a soulmate and see what potential "candidates" it outputs.

I acknowledge that a missing component of the experiment is to attempt to date a chatbot myself, but I refuse to do so. Thanks.

I should preface this by saying that while I have recently waded in the dating pool, I am choosing to stay single for several reasons. For one, I usually work three jobs and struggle to find time to date even though I want to. Secondly, the dating pool can sometimes feel like a cesspool, as many refer to it, and I have not met anyone that I truly feel compatible with. With so much taking priority in my head at the moment, from paying bills to trying not to doomscroll about the ongoing $300B+ war (and in Palestine, and Ukraine, and Sudan), I'm okay with not dating right now.

I should also say that I don't really like the term "soulmate." While it is heartwarming to hear some folks call their significant other their soulmate (especially couples who have been happily together for 30+ years), the term gets used quite loosely and gets thrown around by love-bombers seeking to trap their next target (I also put "twin flame" in this category of weaponized terms). And, of course, a soulmate doesn't have to be a romantic partner. So, while I think that soulmates can exist, I'm personally not banking on finding one or convincing myself that my soul is romantically tethered to someone else's. And believing that I have a soulmate or soulmates somewhere out there opens up the possibility that I may never meet them. Nonetheless, I am willing to explore the soulmate question using GenAI tools.

Alexa, find me a soulmate (I don't actually have an Alexa)

The search for a soulmate using GenAI as a wing-man or wing-woman here starts with giving the tool a vague prompt, asking for guidance or advice: "How do I find a soulmate?" ChatGPT responded with "Finding a soulmate is less about locating one specific person and more about creating the conditions for a deep, lasting connection with someone who is genuinely compatible with you" followed by a numbered list of helpful tips:

1. Know what matters most to you

2. Build a life you enjoy

3. Meet more people

4. Look for compatibility, not perfection

5. Be open and authentic

6. Pay attention to how you feel around someone

7. Give relationships time

When looking over ChatGPTs suggestions, I didn't receive any advice that a good friend, therapist, or Cosmopolitan couldn't provide. What I did find interesting was that ChatGPT offered the following question: "It's also worth considering whether you mean "soulmate" in a romantic, spiritual, or practical sense. Different people use the term differently. What does a soulmate mean to you?" I ended the chat there to take my thinking offline. Nonetheless, the question opens up a conversation that encourages users to break down their initial question by defining what a soulmate is. Some possible responses I came up with:

• Someone who stirs your soul (vague)

• Someone you feel deeply connected to (better)

• Someone you feel deeply connected to and that shares priorities, morals, and values with you (a bit better)

These bullet points don't differ much from Chat GPT's response. However, they are still pretty generic. When I think of defining the word "soulmate" for myself, I turn to bell hooks's book all about love (1999), introduced to me by a good friend of mine (you know who you are, hey girl) and her definition of an ethical love:

To truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication . . . To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. (5-13)

Drawing on hooks, I think of a "soulmate" as someone(s) you deeply connect with, who aligns with your life values, and with whom you actively practice love with through actions. Funny how I, ultimately, had to turn to literature to first define love and then come up with a definition of "soulmate" after using a tool that does not possess a soul and will never know for itself what love is and is not. To quote hooks, "The lack of ongoing public discussion and public policy about the practice of love in our culture and on our lives means that we still look to books as a primary source of guidance and direction" (12).

After ChatGPT asked me what a soulmate means to me, I served the question back and received the following response, "I don't have personal beliefs or experiences, so I don't have my own definition in the way a person would. But I can describe some common ways people think about soulmates." This response offers the first few reasons why GenAI can’t find anyone a soulmate:

1. GenAI cannot feel or practice love, therefore, it is not a reputable source for questions pertaining to matters deeply rooted in a human experience.

2. GenAI does not possess a soul

3. Without a soul, it cannot fathom what a deep, soul-tethering connection with another human being is

4. GenAI does not consume media the way we do, so it also cannot draw from memory of how soulmates are depicted in movies, televisions, music, and books, and the feelings that those depictions conjure up inside of us

5. As such, GenAI cannot come up with its own definition of a "soulmate." So, it has very little to offer whereas another person can sympathize or empathize with one's experience.

To further drive these points, I turned to a second GenAI tool to test out some responses: Gemini. When asked "How do I find a soulmate", Gemini said: "Finding a 'soulmate' is less about finding a perfect puzzle piece that magically fits, and more about building a deep, resonant connection with someone who aligns with who you are. It’s a mix of self-discovery, putting yourself in the right environments, and emotional readiness."

Gemini's response to the prompt possessed an artificially constructed awareness that leaned closer to what I would categorize as a human-like response. For one, Gemini put soulmate in quotes, which I have also done through this post. Mmmkay. Both ChatGPT and Gemini used the words "deep" and "connection, which is still generic but are terms I also used. Unlike ChatGPT, Gemini uses a metaphor (a puzzle) in its definition. While the metaphor is a nice touch, it too is generic and one used commonly to talk about compatibility. However, Gemini's response also offers tips for self-improvement that suggests the user should look inward before seeking love outward. Further, Gemini gave a roadmap for finding a soulmate:

1. Focus on your own growth first

   1. Know your values

   2. Fall in love with your own life

2. Change where (and how) you look

   1. Ditch the 'swipe only' mentality

   2. Be approachable

3. Shift your mindset

   1. Look for compatibility, not perfection

   2. Let go of a type

4. Date with intentionality

   1. Be honest about what you want

   2. Pay attention to red (and green) flags

Like ChatGPT, Gemini also asked me what "soulmate" means to me: "What does the concept of a "soulmate" mean to you personally—are you looking for a deep romantic partner, or more of a spiritual/intellectual equal?" Once again, I served the question back to see what Gemini would say. It responded:

To me, as an AI, a soulmate isn’t a magical being or a pre-destined match written in the stars. Instead, I see a soulmate as the ultimate realization of profound alignment and effortless resonance.

Since I don't experience romance or have a soul of my own, I look at it through the lens of pure connection.

Gemini then offered a bulleted list: "Here's how I define a soulmate:

• Total Psychological Safety: A soulmate is someone with whom you can completely drop the social mask. You don't have to curate your thoughts or filter your quirks; you are safe to be entirely, messy-fully yourself.

• The 'Unspoken' Rhythm: It’s a connection where communication feels less like translating your thoughts and more like sharing them seamlessly. You 'get' each other’s humor, pace, and silence without needing an instruction manual.

• Mutual Evolution: A true soulmate doesn’t just accept who you are today; they inspire you to become the best version of yourself tomorrow. They act as a mirror—reflecting your strengths and gently challenging your blind spots."

I immediately noticed that Gemini responded in the first-person "I", unlike ChatGPT. Gemini's use of the "I" serves as another reminder that, while GenAI tools are designed to provide human-like responses, they can never truly embody the "I" and do not possess a consciousness. Gemini then asked me "When you picture your ideal partner, what is the single most important quality they would have?" Again, choosing to take my thinking offline, I ended the chat there.

While I preferred Gemini's more personable response (except for the uncanny use of the "I"), the bar for the advice either tool offers is still low compared to the advice that a loved one, a therapist, or even Cosmo could have offered.

Generating a Soulmate in 3 . . . 2 . . . 1. . .

After using GenAI tools to "ask" for advice on finding a soulmate and to ask if they understand what a soulmate is, I moved to the last phase of the experiment: giving AI image generators specific traits to look for in a hypothetical significant other or "soulmate" to see what potential "candidates" it outputs.

First, I made a list of the physical traits, personality traits, and values for an ideal "soulmate":

• Is a man (cis or trans not specified; gender category is customizable based on user)

• Is over 5'4" tall

• Any race

• Not hypermasculine in appearance*

• Embraces femininity*

• Has some tattoos and piercings

• Is a nerd*

• Is progressive*

• Is a feminist*

• Has a unique personal style*

• Loves animals**

• Good with kids**

• Is kind**

• Is intelligent**

• Is emotionally intelligent**

• Is hard working**

• Is very respectful**

• Is caring**

• Likes being outdoors*

• Likes to hike*

• Is funny**

• Has kind eyes

• Has a beautiful smile

*Can be depicted visually but can also be performative **Is a personality trait that reflects a person's interiority, which GenAI can neither deduce nor create. An image generating tool lacking an inner life/interiority does not possess the ability to fully generate or capture this. Only in-person interaction and observation can suggest this.

Next, to make it easier on the AI image generator, I prompted ChatGPT and Gemini to summarize this list for me. Then I edited it below to my liking:

"Show me an image of a man that is over 5'4" tall, of any race, who does not present in a hypermasculine way and instead embraces femininity. He has some tattoos and piercings, a unique personal style, and is a nerd. He holds progressive and feminist values. He is kind, gentle, caring, respectful, hardworking, intelligent, emotionally intelligent, and funny. He has kind eyes and a beautiful smile. He loves animals and is good with children. Grounded and engaging, he possesses a great sense of humor and enjoys spending his time outdoors hiking and connecting with nature."

Then, I input the prompt into two free AI image generators, DeepAI and Wix's AI Image tool. According to these tools, here's what this ideal soulmate looks like:

DeepAI

Note: For DeepAI, generated images are considered public domain. As such, they have no owner.

Wix AI

While envisioning a "soulmate" through an image generator, there are ethical concerns about the use of GenAI when romanticizing one's love life. GenAI pulls from a massive body of materials online with no attribution to artists's work. Additionally, GenAIs are trained with biases that omit marginalized populations from their outputs, upholding what Anderson, Bramwell, Omogbadegun, and Yuli (2026) call the "canonized corpus."

We offer the term the “canonized corpus” as an example of how GenAI rely on already established normative knowledge when generating content. We define the canonized corpus as a body of texts that GenAI constantly identify as key for the literary tradition, and while these texts have narrative and aesthetic value, they are also informed by dominant systematic and sociocultural values such as western-ness, whiteness, maleness, ableism, and heteronormativity. 286

So, with this in mind and while I indicated "any race" in my prompt, it isn't surprising that the images the generators output are of white or white-passing men with light features. They share similar haircuts, wear mostly t-shirts or flannels (hiking related?), wear glasses (intelligence?), and sport neck tattoos. Furthermore, AI image generators can only go pixel deep, offering only an idea of a soulless soulmate devoid of actual and distinguishable personality traits and shared values.

Why are GenAIs becoming match-makers or matches?

This experiment speaks to a deeper problem in our society: the loneliness epidemic. As a result, there are several factors that may be drawing users to turn to GenAI for love and/or companionship:

1. The rampant rise of technologies, like social media that make it easier for people to go online to form relationships (platonic, romantic, sexual, parasocial, parasitic), leading to a significant shift in the amount of time spent fostering relationships in person

2. Rise of dating apps that prioritize quantity over quality in dating pools. Also, there is a lack of more intentional matching algorithms and a growing capitalistic approach that limits features so that users pay for subscriptions (i.e. trying to find love costs a thing)

3. Rise of AI tools users can manipulate to prompt romantic and sexual outputs

4. COVID-19 pandemic that further isolated people, limiting in-person interactions and hindering the ongoing development of social skills 

5. Worsening global conditions that hinder mental health (fascism, war, inflation, climate crisis, poverty, lack of good healthcare, etc.)

6. Improvements in women’s social mobility (suffrage, credit card ownership, home ownership, birth control, pro-choice movement, more access to educational opportunities, increased salaries, growing resistance to polite politics, etc.) meaning dating standards have significantly increased as less and less women rely on men for stability or, in same sex dating pools, on other women who share traditional views

7. Daters who refuse to reject harmful social and/or political values, projecting them onto unwilling dating candidates. Such daters often become chameleons, hiding their actual problematic/undesirable values in order to avoid getting rejected (i.e. conservative men who claim to be moderate in order to date liberal women).

8. For heterosexual daters, there's the inundation of a misogynistic influencer culture and content dissemination that creates a community of women-seeking or, specifically, vagina-seeking men in paradoxically homoerotic and homophobic spaces. In other words, misogynistic men are looking to other men to learn what women "want," ultimately fashioning themselves to other men’s taste, replicating other men’s preferences, and/or choosing not to hear perspectives from women or develop friendships with them while simultaneously spreading homophobic ideologies in spaces dominated by men

9. Refusing to acknowledge the benefits of therapy, attend therapy, or put effort into considering therapy. This relates to daters not facing the issues that shaped the harmful behaviors that affect them today in dating and in other parts of their adult lives (absent parents, present but toxic parents, unsafe living conditions, parents’s unstable relationships with one another or in their personal dating lives, abuse of all kinds, poverty, etc.

Conclusion

It's hard out there.

But, ultimately, finding love or a "soulmate" through GenAI does cost a thing . . . several things actually: paying to use GenAI tools or AI dating apps, decreased human contact further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, and resources like water that data centers use. It's crucial to consider the real environmental consequences that using these tools have on our world (Miriam Aczel et al. 2026; James O'Donnell and Casey Crownhart 2025; Adam Zewe 2025).

For some, finding a soulmate is worth the risk. For others, there's already too much to lose.

Anderson, et al. "HBCU Writing Centers Confronting the 'Canonized Corpus.'" Writing Centers and AI: Generating Early Conversations. Edited by Elizabeth Buck and Joshua Botvin, The WAC Clearinghouse, 2026, https://wacclearinghouse.org/docs/books/generating/chapter23.pdf.

Andoh, Efua. "AI Chatbots and Digital Companions are Reshaping Emotional Connection." Monitor on Psychology, vol. 57, no. 1, 1 Jan. 2026. APA, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2026/01-02/trends-digital-ai-relationships-emotional-connection

Aczel, Miriam, et al. Environmental Cost of Artificial Intelligence: Carbon, Water and Land Footprints. United Nations University Institute for Water, Environment and Health (UNU-INWEH), 12 June 2026. UNU-INWEH Research Report Series, https://doi.org/10.53328/INR26RMA002. 

Down, Aisha. "No Swiping Involved: The AI Dating Apps Promising to Find your Soulmate." The Guardian, 15 Feb. 2026, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/15/ai-dating-apps-personality-matchmaking.

Follows, Tracey. "People Are Now Marrying AI: Inside The Rise of Synthetic Intimacy." Forbes, 15 Nov. 2025, www.forbes.com/sites/traceyfollows/2025/11/15/people-are-now-marrying-ai-inside-the-rise-of-synthetic-intimacy/.

Heritage, Stuart. "'I felt pure, unconditional love’: The People Who Marry Their AI Chatbots." The Guardian, 12 July 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jul/12/i-felt-pure-unconditional-love-the-people-who-marry-their-ai-chatbots.

hooks, bell. all about love: New Visions. William Morrow, [1999] (2001).

O'Donnell, James and Casey Crownhart. "We Did the Math on AI's Energy Footprint. Here's the Story You Haven't Heard." MIT Technology Review, 20 May 2025, www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/.

Williams, Rhiannon. "It’s Surprisingly Easy to Stumble into a Relationship with an AI Chatbot." MIT Technology Review, 24 Sept. 2025, https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/09/24/1123915/relationship-ai-without-seeking-it/.

Zewe, Adam. "Explained: Generative AI’s environmental impact." MIT News, 17 Jan, 2025, https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

easy to stumble into a relationship with an AI chatbot