Grindr, the popular dating app for gay men, holds a lot of sensitive information about its users and has had a number of privacy issues in the past, so the last thing that you probably want to hear from its developers is, “We’re going to start vibe coding this whole app.” In related news, Grindr’s CEO told the New York Times the company plans on vibe coding the whole app.
George Arison, who took over the role of chief executive at Grindr in 2022, is apparently all-in on AI—even when it goes against his employees’ wishes and likely his users’ best interests. While speaking to the Times, Arison said he plans to whip Grindr into shape as an AI-native company. His first step in achieving that was hiring a guy and ignoring the rest of his staff.
Asked how he’s gotten AI adoption in the Grindr office, Arison said, “I just imposed it. I got a lot of opposition.” Despite the 180 people or so on Grindr’s payroll objecting, Arison leaned on someone else’s opinion: some dude named Evan. Per Arison, he hired Evan, a “young engineer who joined an AI company out of college,” to be his AI tutor.
Apparently, Evan is very convincing because the whole company is supposedly now using AI (though probably not nearly as much as Arison, who said, “I put all my content in ChatGPT”). Per the Times, Arison’s goal is for AI to produce all new code, and for the company to run “leaner.” The exact thing that employees want to hear! Arison insists that “I don’t think I’m going to let people go, but we might not add as many as we would otherwise.” We’ll see how long he can resist giving in to the free stock boost that an AI-washed layoff typically provides.
Arison has admitted that the AI adoption process hasn’t been perfect. “We learned that A.I. agents learn off the code base that you have. Because that code had so many bugs in it, it put similar types of bugs in as it was writing code,” he said—which feels like a thing his tutor should have covered.
Given how AI agent-generated code has been shown to introduce serious vulnerabilities into software, this should probably not be heard as a positive development for Grindr’s users. Back in 2018, the company was found to be sharing a litany of sensitive user information, including HIV status, sexual health testing dates, GPS location, and emails with third-parties. A later incident found that Grindr accounts could be very easily hacked with little more than a person’s email address. The last thing its users want to worry about is an AI-generated vulnerability leading to more of their information being leaked.
Even though most people hate AI in dating apps, none of the dating apps can help themselves but to go all-in on AI. Bumble recently tried to position itself as an AI-forward dating app, going so far as to end swiping in favor of AI assistant recommendations. The company is now exploring a sale, which should tell you how well that went.
Tinder has also positioned its AI adoption as a potential way to “fix” online dating (which is rich coming from the company most responsible for breaking it in the first place), and has supposedly slowed its hiring in order to invest more in AI.
