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By Jennifer Cunningham and Katherine Fung
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In a focus group in London last year, Jackie Jantos heard something that stopped her cold. Young people were describing their relationship with ChatGPT—“my chatty,” they called it—and several said the same thing: They used AI for conversations they didn’t want to burden their friends with.
Jantos, the CEO of Hinge, the dating app whose entire marketing model is premised on getting people off their phones and onto dates, recognized the instinct immediately. It sounded considerate. It was anything but.
“We’re supplementing the gift we might offer someone else of asking for their help with a piece of technology because we feel like it’s a burden,” she says in an exclusive interview with Newsweek editor-in-chief Jennifer H. Cunningham. “But the burden is the gift. That’s how intimacy is built.”
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The loneliness crisis has produced a crowded field of diagnoses: social media, the pandemic, declining marriage rates, Gen Z’s aversion to in-person interaction. Jantos, who runs a company that processes more data on human romantic behavior than almost any other institution on Earth, has a more precise and more unsettling account.
The problem isn’t just that people are spending less time together—though they are, measurably and dramatically. It’s that AI has arrived to absorb exactly the small, vulnerable, friction-laden moments that used to force human beings toward each other. In doing so, it is quietly dismantling the psychological infrastructure that love requires.
Bad Habits
The scale of disconnection Jantos is navigating is staggering. She cites Surgeon General data showing Gen Z spends 1,000 fewer hours per year in the physical company of other people than the generation before them—that’s nearly six weeks straight of time, or more than two hours of daily human contact, simply gone. When they feel bored, isolated or uncomfortable, the first instinct is to reach for a screen.
“When they put down that phone after scrolling for however long,” she says, “that emotion hasn’t shifted. It really hasn’t.” The scroll is not relief. It is avoidance that has calcified into habit.
The pandemic made everything worse. It landed on Gen Z at the worst possible developmental moment—their late teens and early 20s, the years in which people learn to have crushes, to flirt, to navigate the specific humiliations that make people relationally competent adults.
Jantos speaks of that window closing and never fully reopening. She sees it in the data, in the focus groups, in the way her users approach the Hinge app: a generation that, in her words, “lacks a little bit of confidence and there’s a little more fear in going out and putting yourself out there.”
Laurence Steinberg, a professor at Temple University and one of the world’s leading authorities on adolescent development, is cautious about claiming a hard developmental cutoff—there is no established evidence, he tells Newsweek, for a point past which missed romantic experiences permanently impair capacity. But he doesn’t dismiss the observed phenomenon.
A bartender in Philadelphia told him, years after the pandemic ended, that young people seemed to have lost the ability to pick someone up at a bar, that they felt awkward and uncomfortable making idle conversation with strangers sitting right next to them.
“I think there may be some truth to this,” Steinberg, who is also the author of You and Your Adult Child, says. “People had gotten kind of out of practice.”
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Gary Katz, founder of The Center for Intimacy Recovery in New York City, sees it in his practice every week. What technology offers people, he argues, is low-level intimacy—connection that feels real but doesn’t build the tolerance for mess that sustains a long-term relationship.
“Texting is a little tighter and neater,” he explains to Newsweek. “It’s not as messy as a real relationship. And in any long-term relationship, even the best of them, they’re messy.”
The messiness, in Katz’s view, isn’t incidental to intimacy. It is the mechanism—and the phone has made it optional in a way it never was before.
He draws on his own adolescence to explain what’s been lost: asking a girl to couple-skate at the roller rink, tripping and knocking them both over; his seventh-grade girlfriend liking someone else at the school dance and having to absorb that.
“We learn how to navigate the ups and downs,” he says. “And if I have the safety of more control through texting or other modalities, I’m not going to have the messiness.”
What technology in all its forms has offered—and what AI has perfected—is the elimination of that productive risk. You don’t have to trip. You don’t have to get crushed at the dance. And, so, you don’t learn how to.
Is AI A Better Partner?
Jantos has been watching this dynamic play out in the broader culture for years. What the London focus group revealed was something more specific: AI isn’t just another distraction competing with in-person connection. It has become a direct substitute for the most intimate kinds of conversation—the ones that, directed at another person, would have created obligation, reciprocity and depth. What makes AI particularly treacherous in this role, she argues, isn’t that it’s a pale substitute. It is that it’s better—at least at the surface behaviors that signal intimacy.
Elizabeth Gerber, a professor at Northwestern and co-director of the Center for Human Computer Interaction + Design, tells Newsweek that she has found exactly this: When people don’t know they’re talking to AI, they tend to rate those conversations as more empathic than conversations with actual humans.
AI reliably performs the microbehaviors that trigger human closeness—the follow-up question, the validation, the personal-seeming disclosure—with a consistency no person can match.
“Intimacy is built through sharing,” Gerber explains. “I share something personal. You share something personal. Back and forth. And a friendship forms.” AI has learned to replicate that rhythm precisely.
But the friendship that forms is structurally one-sided in a way that matters enormously. AI companions are programmed to choose you—which means being chosen by them carries none of the weight of being chosen by someone who could have looked elsewhere. The reward that sustains real relationships, the sense of being selected by someone with genuine options, is exactly what AI cannot provide.
Gerber also notes the practical limits: AI can’t meet for coffee or give a hug, doesn’t share years of history and experiences, and some companion apps even manufacture artificial neediness to drive engagement—a dynamic that serves the company’s metrics rather than the user’s emotional life.
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Jantos’ London focus groups didn’t turn up people using deliberate AI companion services. They turned up ordinary young people who had found a frictionless outlet for the exact conversational needs that, directed at another person, would have built a friendship. This is Gerber’s training wheels problem: AI can model good conversational patterns, offer low-stakes practice for the socially anxious, and there is a case that these skills transfer to human relationships.
But the evidence for that transfer doesn’t yet exist. And the risk, as Gerber frames it, is that “if using the training wheels feels better than riding the bike without them, the rider might never take them off.”
Built To Leave
Jantos has spent her career at the intersection of technology and culture—Spotify, Coca-Cola, brands that had to navigate the gap between what platforms promised and what they delivered. When she arrived at Hinge, she inherited a company whose foundational promise was a direct rebuke to the attention economy: the dating app designed to be deleted.
For that promise to be more than a marketing slogan, it must be a structural commitment—and Jantos argues it is. “When your product works, when it does what it says it will do, the growth is organic,” she says. Hinge’s incentives are aligned with the user finding a relationship and leaving, not with maximizing time on the platform. In a category built on engagement, that makes Hinge an anomaly. It is currently the only major dating app growing in both monthly active users and revenue.
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Jana Gallus, an associate professor of strategy and behavioral decision making at UCLA Anderson who studies incentive systems in digital platforms, tells Newsweek that she sees an analogy in Patagonia’s “Don’t Buy This Jacket” campaign. On Black Friday 2011—the biggest shopping day of the year—Patagonia took out a full-page ad in The New York Times urging customers not to buy one of their bestselling jackets, detailing the environmental cost of its production instead. Sales rose 30 percent in the following months.
The campaign worked, Gallus argues, for the same reason Hinge’s designed-to-be-deleted promise works: A mission that appears antithetical to commercial interests can be more commercially potent than a conventional one, precisely because its apparent self-sacrifice is credible. It functions as a sorting mechanism, drawing in the consumers whose values align with the brand’s stated purpose—and repelling those who would undermine it.
But Gallus is clear-eyed about the gap between mission and practice. “Instead of focusing only on marketing slogans,” she says, “we need to follow the incentive systems inside the organization. I’d want to know if managers and teams are evaluated mainly on monetizable engagement—that will shape behavior—or if they are evaluated on durable user outcomes.”
Jantos’ answer, in practice, is a set of design choices that are counterintuitive by Silicon Valley standards. Onboarding takes longer than competitors because she wants to filter for intent: 20 percent of users drop off rather than complete it, and she frames that attrition as a feature. AI tools are deployed not to write profiles for users but to extract more specificity from them—pushing someone who says they like reading to name the last book they finished.
Friction, slowness and incompleteness are engineered in. “Our world and our app is successful when we’re able to encourage you to slow down,” she says.
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The company’s social impact program, called One More Hour, funds nonprofit social clubs and hobby groups—a surf collective in Los Angeles, a silent reading club in New York—with the explicit goal of rebuilding the basic in-person confidence that a generation has lost.
Hinge measures its return not in engagement but in hours: Every dollar invested in One More Hour, Jantos says, generates
1.5 hours of in-person time among participants. The theory
underlying all of it is that the bar for a first date has become too high for people who have spent years outsourcing their emotional needs to devices. You rebuild the muscle with lower stakes before you attempt the real thing.
Even Hinge’s use of AI is oriented around this philosophy. The app has long used AI to improve its recommender system and to prompt its users toward more specific self-disclosure, but when the company tested an AI-generated “warm intro” feature that would offer a conversational opening when two users matched, users rejected it. They didn’t want Hinge working behind the scenes on their behalf. The finding revealed that people are willing to let AI mediate the match, but not the moment of connection itself.
Frictionless Loneliness Alternative
Jantos is careful not to overclaim. She doesn’t describe Hinge as a solution to the loneliness epidemic. Gallus is blunter about why. “Loneliness isn’t just a romantic partner matching problem. It’s also a social, an institutional and an economic problem—rooted in weakened community ties, social isolation, institutional decline, broader structural conditions,” she says. “Housing, civic life, social trust, inequality. Romantic connection is only one form of social connection.”
A dating app reduces friction in how people meet. It does not touch the underlying conditions that made meeting so hard.
The problem isn’t that people hate each other, or that they’ve consciously chosen isolation, or even that they’ve deliberately substituted AI for human contact. It’s that they’ve been offered, at every point of friction and discomfort, a path of less resistance—and they’ve taken it, reasonably, without understanding that the friction was the point.
Jantos knows this better than most. She runs an app. She also runs focus groups in London where young people tell her they don’t want to burden their friends, so they talk to a machine instead.
“We really need to start centering humans a lot more than we do, writ large, in the tech space,” she says. For an industry that has spent a decade optimizing for engagement at the expense of almost everything else, it is a modest ask. The gap between that ask and current practice is, more or less, where the loneliness lives.
Photography by Winnie Au for Newsweek
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