  What makes people 'click' on a first date and become mutually attracted to
one another? While understanding and predicting the dynamics of romantic
interactions used to be exclusive to human judgment, we show that Large
Language Models (LLMs) can detect romantic attraction during brief
getting-to-know-you interactions. Examining data from 964 speed dates, we show
that ChatGPT (and Claude 3) can predict both objective and subjective
indicators of speed dating success (r=0.12-0.23). ChatGPT's predictions of
actual matching (i.e., the exchange of contact information) were not only on
par with those of human judges who had access to the same information but
incremental to speed daters' own predictions. While some of the variance in
ChatGPT's predictions can be explained by common content dimensions (such as
the valence of the conversations) the fact that there remains a substantial
proportion of unexplained variance suggests that ChatGPT also picks up on
conversational dynamics. In addition, ChatGPT's judgments showed substantial
overlap with those made by the human observers (mean r=0.29), highlighting
similarities in their representation of romantic attraction that is, partially,
independent of accuracy.
