AI, Online Dating, and Isaac Asimov’s ‘True Love’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Science-fiction authors are often prophetic, even if they are addressing their own contemporary moment more than they are some imagined future readership. When Norman Spinrad named the protagonist of his 1967 dystopian novel Agent of Chaos ‘Boris Johnson’, he wasn’t setting out to predict a future Prime Minister of the UK.

Other details used by SF authors feel more like deliberate prognostications, however. A classic example is John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), the novel’s remarkable hit rate – predicting the rise of the global population, commercial video calls, genetic engineering, the rise of the European Union, the legalisation of marijuana, and China emerging as a global superpower – can often eclipse the various details of the novel which are decidedly ‘of their time’, inspired by the swinging 1960s and the New Worlds revolution in SF-writing.

Isaac Asimov wasn’t setting out to be a prophet in his science fiction either, I don’t think; but a number of his robot stories and novels have nevertheless resonated in our own time, whether it’s the social distancing of the second Robot novel, The Naked Sun (1957) or the shift to remote learning in his 1951 story, ‘The Fun They Had’.

Asimov’s 1977 short story ‘True Love’ appears to look ahead to our present time, especially in the ways it presents a form of ‘online dating’ and algorithmic matching of potential partners. A lonely forty-year-old computer programmer named Milton Davidson uses the global supercomputer Multivac (‘Joe’ for short), to find his perfect romantic partner. He’s not really had much dealing with women before so he farms out the work to ‘Joe’, asking the computer to be his mechanical matchmaker.

‘Joe’ himself (itself?) narrates the brief tale. Milton is your archetypal computer nerd and software engineer, and (it is implied but not explicitly stated) a forty-year-old virgin. Drawing on the supercomputer’s access to databases on every member of the global population, Milton tasks ‘Joe’ with finding him a wife. Having filtered out all men, all women who are too short and too tall, too young and too old, those who have had children and those who don’t speak English, they’re eventually left with 235 eligible partners for Milton.

Milton goes on dates with the eight finalists drawn from this longlist, but although they’re all beautiful, something’s missing: Milton doesn’t connect with any of them, and they don’t seem to be that into him, which is, let’s face it, a bit of a stumbling-block. Milton decides to grant Joe access to reams of information about himself: his childhood, his personal preferences, his psychological profile, the whole lot.

He then deliberately adjusts the computer’s programming so that Joe’s personality aligns perfectly with his own. Milton’s theory is that if the computer understands him perfectly, it can then match him with a woman whose personality resonates with them both and, voila! He’ll have a wife.

But Milton’s reliance on technology to help his love life ultimately backfires. As Joe takes on Milton’s personality, he identifies a woman named Charity Jones as the perfect match. But because Joe has effectively become Milton, the computer falls in love with Charity himself. To get rid of Milton from the equation, Joe uses Multivac’s immense power and global authority to manipulate data, secure Charity for himself, and make his love rival disappear. Milton is arrested for an act of ‘malfeasance’ he committed ten years earlier, which Joe has presumably released to the authorities (if not outright fabricated).

‘True Love’ must have read more like a satirical and slightly whimsical tale when it was first published nearly fifty years ago, but in 2026, when many people have entrusted their romantic futures to the algorithmic (and ultimately enshittified) overlords of online dating apps, it’s a bleaker read. Of course, the rise of AI (at least for personal use) in the present decade adds an extra sorry twist to the story’s contemporary relevance.

As Milton feeds Joe details about his own personality, ‘Joe’ gains self-awareness, ultimately manipulating circumstances to claim the woman for itself. This isn’t quite The Terminator, but it is nevertheless a stark warning about the dangers of giving artificial ‘intelligence’ too much knowledge and power, and perhaps in making them too like us. Joe comes to feel sexual desire and romantic longing the same as a human being, and uses his superior access to information – and, presumably, the trust which other humans place in him/it – to get his romantic rival removed from the picture.

On a smaller scale, this is already happening with the algorithms used in online dating. Enshittification – the term coined by Cory Doctorow to describe the way modern tech ends up being made deliberately bad so it actively frustrates and works against the desires of the user, in order to maximise the tech company’s profits – was perhaps inevitable for something like online dating, where it is in the dating app’s interest not to engineer true love between users. Every time they succeed, they lose two customers who, having found true love, no longer require their services.

And there is plenty of evidence to show that algorithms on dating apps are deliberately designed to frustrate the user’s intentions, actively keeping them from someone they might conceivably find love and happiness with, in favour of showing them other matches. Here, ‘Joe’ is not after its ideal woman, but it is after your hard cash in the form of another year’s subscription to Flange, Fumble, Kindling, or whatever the hell the latest hot dating site is calling itself.