Last year, a headline on The Cut got right to the point: “AI Is Making Online Dating Even Worse.” As writer Anna Louie Sussman explained, this can take several forms, from “AI wingmen” to singles using ChatGPT to come up with more compelling responses in conversations. Presumably, if you’re on a dating app, you’re doing so to meet actual people as opposed to AI chatbots.
But in 2026, it’s also increasingly easy to use AI to create a realistic-looking dating profile for a user who does not actually exist. It’s a problem specific to dating apps themselves; if you meet a potential date in person, there’s no doubt that they are, in fact, a person. Is there a way to have that kind of certainty while looking for someone online?
This month, Tinder announced an expansion of its partnership with World, a company that began its existence with a focus on cryptocurrency and has since shifted gears to a business model that involves retinal scans and verifying that people are actually people. (OpenAI’s Sam Altman is one of the people behind World.) To hear one of the companies involved in the collaboration tell it, this partnership is an extension of their ongoing policies.
“We’re continuously innovating our safety tools, including launching Face Check for liveness verification, encouraging more respectful behavior with ‘Are You Sure?’, and ‘Share My Date’, which helps people feel confident meeting IRL,” said Yoel Roth, Match Group’s Senior Vice President of Trust and Safety, in a statement. “Partnering with World ID is a natural next step in that commitment, giving our users a powerful, privacy-preserving way to help know the person on the other end is real.”
The process of obtaining a World ID involves signing up for the company’s app and getting a retinal scan from one of the company’s Orb devices. Their FAQ emphasizes privacy: “Proof of human verification powered by the Orb only involves one type of data: images of your eyes and face. It does not require your name, email, gender or anything else.”
The Year the Dating Apps Died
While their downfall has been prophesied for years, there’s finally a trend that can replace them: “intentional dating”Privacy issues remain a concern, however. Last year, the Bangkok Post reported that Thailand’s government had ordered World to delete its data obtained within the country, arguing that World offering people cryptocurrency for retinal scans was illegal. That said, a growing number of people are on board with the service: WIRED reports that 18 million people have signed up for it thus far. Will having a connection to dating apps raise those numbers? We’re about to find out.
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