AI and DateSMP

The artwork is AI, and it is temporary

Nearly every illustration on DateSMP right now came out of an image model. The activity cards, the empty states, the pictures on the public pages. We know exactly how that reads in 2026, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or bury it in a footnote.

Here is the unglamorous reason. DateSMP is paid for out of our own pocket, and we wanted to open it free: no subscription screen, no blurred-out likes, no counting how many people you are allowed to talk to. Something had to give, and we would rather it were the illustration budget than the product. Commissioning twenty original pieces before a single person had signed up was not a thing we could afford.

So these are placeholders, and we mean that literally. Every one of them is meant to be replaced by a person who is better at this than a model is. If you are that person, we would genuinely like to hear from you.

Where AI is used, exactly

Illustrations

Generated. The activity artwork, the empty states, the pictures on the public pages. All of it is meant to be replaced.

Writing

Some of the wording across the site and the app was drafted with an assistant and then edited by a person. The legal documents were written deliberately and checked line by line against what the code actually does.

Code

Written with AI assistance, reviewed by a person, and tested. That is ordinary now and we are not going to be precious about it.

Where it is not used, and will not be

These are the ones that would actually matter to you, so they get their own list rather than a sentence.

• Nobody on DateSMP is generated. Every profile is a person who made an account. There are no filler profiles, no seeded accounts to make the place look busy, and no bots to talk to while you wait for a match.
• Nothing writes messages for you or to you. There is no suggested reply, no smart opener, no assistant sitting between two people. If somebody sends you a sentence, a person typed it.
• No model decides who you see. The deck is your stated preferences, your location, and who you have already answered. It is arithmetic you could do by hand, and nobody is ranked by anything they paid for.
• No moderation decision is automated. Every photograph is approved or refused by a person, and an account is only restricted by a person looking at it. That is slower than a classifier and it is the reason a new photo does not appear instantly.
• Your photographs and your messages are not training data. They are not sent to a model, ours or anybody else's, for any purpose.

Why bother saying any of this

No rule requires this page. The EU AI Act is mostly about systems that make decisions about people, and generated pictures on a website are not that. Nobody would have fined us for staying quiet.

We think it is the right thing anyway, for a fairly self-interested reason as well as a principled one. DateSMP asks people to put their face and their orientation and their evenings into it. A product that will quietly let you assume an artist drew something is a product that will quietly let you assume other things, and we would rather not start there.

There is also a version of this we are not doing, which feels worth naming: adding a small “AI-assisted” badge somewhere legally defensible and moving on. The honest version costs us something, because saying it out loud invites exactly the reaction the badge is designed to avoid.

What would change it

A designer, or the money to pay one. Those are the only two things.

If you make things

This is the one we would most like to hear about. Tell us what you make. We are not looking for free work; we are looking for somebody to pay when there is money to pay them with, and we would rather know who you are before then.

If you would like to help pay for it

Donations go to the servers a date runs on and to replacing these pictures. It is optional and it stays optional. DateSMP works exactly the same whether you give us anything or not, and there is no version of this where that changes.

If this page goes out of date

Then it is wrong, and we would like to know. Tell us. The intention is that this page describes what is actually true on the day you read it, which means it should get shorter over time rather than longer.