Tinder can now pick your most attractive photos: What about authenticity?

ATTENTION, Tinder users! Your favorite dating app is about to release a new feature: the AI Photo Selector. 

In the past, as per Yahoo News, Tinder would just choose a lead photo from the ones you upload. Now, however, the app can look at your entire photo library, choosing the 10 images that will do the best on your profile. 

This feature, already launched in the US, requires you to take a photo of yourself so that the Selector can identify you from the other people in your gallery, and will then automatically choose the photos that’ll go on your profile. 

You can, of course, choose from the photos given to you to be the selector after this.

Tinder notes that, in making this feature, the selector takes into consideration the lighting and composition of the photo, as well as other aspects similar to this. 

They also clarify that they will not be benefitting from any of the data found in your library, as they will not be collecting, storing, accessing, or receiving any biometrics from your photos. All biometric data is then deleted any time you close the selector.

On their website, Tinder explains that 85% of single people want their dating profiles to represent their true selves, and 52% find it hard to select a profile photo, often spending about 33 minutes in choosing them. 68% also state that they would find an AI feature to assist them in photo selection to be helpful.

One has to wonder, however: How will the algorithm of this feature be able to tell which photos represent the real you? 

In the spirit of authenticity

Part of the fun of downloading a dating app is creating a profile that you think best showcases who you are, and part of that is choosing the photos that you think display your identity and personality the most. 

What fun, then, is having an algorithm do all that for you? 

In 2021, as per a third-party survey commissioned by Bumble, 42% of Filipinos used a dating app within the year. Nowadays, it’s completely normal to have at least one dating app on your phone or to meet couples who found each other through Tinder or Bumble. 

Whenever I was single, I would usually download a dating app or two, and would then go through the process of making an account. When choosing my photos, however, I didn’t pick the ones that best showcased my personality, or showed the things that I liked. I picked the ones I knew I looked my best in.

An argument that some people have been making is that dating apps are the death of romance, and of real connections. And on apps where you most likely choose who you want to date based on how they look – where the idea that looks aren’t everything suddenly goes down the drain – it’s hard to blame them for feeling this way.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with using dating apps. There have been many success stories in romance thanks to their creation: happily married couples, and partners who have been together for years all thanks to one fateful swipe to the right.

I only hope, however, that we veer away from the idea that we have to be our prettiest, our coolest, our most perfect when making our profiles. 

Part of dating someone is the authenticity and rawness of it, of finding a person that interests you, of getting to know the deepest, darkest parts of someone, and of loving them in the good and bad. 

Some, however, have been conditioned to think that people are only ever gonna love them in the good.

As per the news site Your Tango, like everything else has its pros and cons. You’re perfectly free to use Tinder, or to use features like its Photo Selector any time you want. But don’t be afraid to stay true to yourself – and don’t be afraid to show others your true self – while doing so.