“On the matchmaking app, if we ask you a question and your tonality changes in the response, it cues to us that you may not be telling us the full truth. And so we’ll ask you that same question in two or three different ways throughout your experience,” Cohen-Aslatei says. “We built this to mimic what a matchmaker would do for a client. The LLM is tracking pitch and tone change in your voice because we want to make sure that we have an accurate understanding of who you are and what you’re looking for.”

After answering dozens more questions about lifestyle, future goals, boundaries, family, attraction, hobbies, and more over the course of a few days, Tai told me it’d take the information provided and get back to me. Two days later, I received my first two potential matches.

I Love You, Alive Girl

As a 31-year-old woman, I put my ideal age range at a healthy 26 to 40 years old. My first two matches were 23 and 47. One was not alive when 9/11 happened, and the other had already graduated from college at that time. Off to a rocky start.

When a potential match is found, the person’s picture is blurred, and Tai gives you a synopsis of what makes you a potential good match. (You need to provide selfie verification to confirm identity, and no one unverified will ever be matched.) After that, you can click to see a bit more about them, like profession, age, income, and a short bio that the AI creates.

At this stage of AI adoption, there is still a strong statistical bias toward, let’s say, men who wear wraparound sunglasses and think driving a Cybertruck is a sign of virility. Nearly every one of the 16 matches I received during testing was Christian and wanting children ASAP, which Tai flagged each time as a potential issue. Many were also flagged initially by Tai because they only wanted to date a certain race or valued traditional gender roles, both of which I made clear that I wasn’t aligned with.

Out of journalistic duty, I accepted every match I received; even a MMA-loving body builder that enjoys grilling meat (I’m vegan) and going to the gun range (I’m generally anti-gun). Matches ranged from Portland, Oregon, to DC, to New York City (where I live, although most matches were outside NYC). Overall, not a single person I was matched with would be someone I’d swipe right on if I saw them on a traditional dating app.

If you accept, you’ll either need to wait for the other person to accept or pass on the match, or they will have already accepted, and you can begin chatting. Here, your AI dating coach steps in to play wingman, providing prompts based on the other person’s profile, highlighting similarities you have, and giving conversation questions based on answers from the match’s profile. Not only does the coach provide potential ice breakers (and responses), you can also chat and ask for pointers.

I asked it to give me tips on how to break the ice with new matches, and it gave me advice, with each point having an explanatory paragraph below. Advice included giving compliments, asking open-ended questions, using humor, referencing current events, sharing about yourself, and mentioning mutual interests. The advice was basic but solid, and mirrored what the coach was doing with the provided conversation prompts.

This is all a great idea in theory, and could be very helpful with people who have a tough time communicating with strangers. But it could also lead to a bigger problem. You don’t really know who you’ve been talking to if AI has been doing all of the chatting for you. And if you meet in person, you don’t know much about your date’s actual personality. You can tell so much from how people type, what questions they ask, and their sense of humor. That was all missing here.

In the US, nearly half of adults are single. A quarter of men suffer from loneliness. Rates of depression are on the rise. And one in four Gen Z adults—the so-called kinkiest generation, according to one study—have never had partnered sex.

In an age of endless connection, where hooking up happens with the ease of a swipe and nontraditional relationship structures like polyamory are celebrated, why are people seemingly so disconnected and alone?

Chalk it up to changing social norms or shifting generational attitudes around relationships. But the bigger issue at play, according to Justin Garcia, is that we just don’t crave intimacy in the same way we used to. “Our species is on the precipice of what I have come to think of as an intimacy crisis,” Garcia writes in his new book, The Intimate Animal: The Science of Sex, Fidelity, and Why We Die for Love. Garcia suggests in the book that intimacy—not sex—is the “the most powerful evolutionary motivator of modern relationships,” but that our hunger for it “has been stifled by and misdirected in today’s digital world.”

An evolutionary biologist and anthropologist who began his career studying hookup culture, Garcia is the executive director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, a research lab known for its pioneering work on sexuality, online dating, and aging. (Sex may in fact improve with age, a recent report found). He’s held the position since 2019, and in that time he has also served as the chief scientific advisor to Match, where he provides expertise for its annual Singles in America survey. In 2023, Indiana lawmakers voted to block public funding from the institute—state senator Lorissa Sweet, a Republican, falsely claimed that Kinsey was studying orgasms in minors—but, the following year, the school’s Board of Trustees voted to abandon its plans to separate the institute into a nonprofit.

Garcia’s book covers a lot of ground—the “cognitive overload” of dating apps, why humans are wired to be socially monogamous but not sexually monogamous, the science of breakups—but its throughline is how “even in this bewildering era, where moments of human connection are becoming increasingly elusive, the search for intimacy remains the most human of human impulses.”

On a recent afternoon over Zoom, I spoke with Garcia about the biggest misconception about the sex recession among Gen Z, the attack on sexual literacy in the current political climate, and why an AI chatbot won’t save your relationship. It’s all connected, he says.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: What is the intimacy crisis, and why, as you write in the book, are we on the verge of one?

Justin Garcia: We hear a lot about the loneliness epidemic. The research suggests that loneliness is as bad for your health as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. Psychological loneliness gets embodied in physical and psychological health. At the same time, there are reports that suggest that the numbers haven’t increased all that much for psychological loneliness. But clearly its impact is more, and more people are paying attention to the impact.

For me, there’s a bigger umbrella. We are suddenly talking about loneliness at the same time that all of us have more connections than ever before. That’s why I call it an intimacy crisis. We have more people available to us, particularly through internet and social media platforms, but the depth of the connections, the quality of the connections, is not there.

You suggest that the intimacy crisis can lead to “unprecedented and stark biological consequences.” In what way?

We’re in a moment where the human brain is taking in so much information and so much of the information is threatening. It’s what’s going on in the news, in Gaza and Minnesota, with climate change, with global economics—I mean, pick any section of the paper, it’s bad news. That weighs on our nervous system. Just as humans’ romantic and sexualized lives respond to environments with how they form relationship structures, they’re also responding to this current environment, which is that there’s a lot of threat going on. When the nervous system gets tuned up into a threat response, that’s not conducive to social behavior and it’s most certainly not conducive to mating. If our nervous system is detecting threats from all this stuff in our environment, that has all sorts of effects on our relationships. And if we don’t have the safety net of deep intimacy, we can’t effectively weather these storms.

A month after the Trump administration began its immigration enforcement operation in Minneapolis, right-wing creators are turning their attention to a new target in search of fraud: California.

Over the last few weeks, right-wing creators who were instrumental in boosting the Minnesota fraud allegations that predated the administration’s surge of federal immigration agents have been going after a number of California’s social welfare programs, making unsubstantiated accusations of fraud—and potentially laying the groundwork for a similar federal crackdown in the nation’s largest Democrat-run state. They’re already getting support from some of President Donald Trump’s key allies too.

Nick Shirley, the right-wing influencer whose viral YouTube video claimed to uncover a purported $100 million fraud scheme involving Somali childcare centers in Minnesota, posted to Instagram over the weekend announcing his arrival in California. “Secrets out,” Shirley wrote in an Instagram story set to Katy Perry’s “California Gurls.” It’s unclear what exactly Shirley plans to do, but he claims to be “investigating” Somali-run childcare centers in California as well, according to posts that circulated on X over the weekend.

Shirley is working with Amy Reichert, a private investigator and failed politician who claims to be investigating “ghost daycares” in California. In his Minnesota video, Shirley “investigated” the fraud by showing up to daycares asking to see children. He appears to be applying the same method in San Diego. Reichert posted a picture with Shirley to X on Saturday, writing “California, here we come! When @nickshirlye drops the video, it’s going to be 🔥.” (Local Minnesota outlets published multiple stories covering childcare fraud years before Shirley’s video came out.)

On Sunday, Benny Johnson, a pro-Trump creator and Turning Point USA contributor, published his own “documentary,” in a similar vein to what Shirley filmed in Minnesota. In it, he claimed to reveal a multimillion-dollar “homeless industrial complex” in California. Johnson teamed up with two Republican gubernatorial candidates, Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton, a former adviser to UK prime minister David Cameron, in the video, which they claimed was an attempt to uncover fraudulent uses of federal funding to support California’s unhoused. Johnson also claimed that the state was “using these federal dollars to rig national elections.”

California governor Gavin Newsom’s office rejected the claims Johnson made in an X post on Sunday, calling the video “literally the conspiracy theory meme in real life.”

Johnson’s most recent video attempts to claim that California’s homeless shelters are primarily filled with undocumented immigrants. His main piece of evidence is a phone call with a purported “whistleblower” whose identity was concealed. (Newsom’s office responded to this claim, calling it “as real as our Free Unicorn for all undocumented people program.”)

The same week Johnson announced that he would be traveling to California to uncover “fraud,” Trump called California “more corrupt” than Minnesota in a post on Truth Social. “Fraud Investigation of California has begun,” Trump wrote. Last week, Trump named a new assistant attorney general, Colin McDonald, to focus on fraud investigations at the Justice Department.

Other large pro-Trump accounts and news outlets, like Real America’s Voice, are boosting Johnson’s recent video. Larry Elder, talk radio host and former presidential candidate, reposted the video on X on Tuesday, writing “Fraud in California makes that of Minnesota look like a starter kit.”

Elon Musk, who Shirley thanked for initially boosting his December Minnesota video, has also been elevating news coverage related to California fraud. “Truly insane levels of fraud!” Musk said, reposting a story from Fox News earlier this week.