Rethinking Dating Apps as Sexual Consent Apps: A New Use Case for AI-Mediated Communication

Abstract

This paper reports a participatory design study about how dating apps could be designed to mediate sexual consent exchange and ultimately serve as scalable sexual violence prevention solutions. Participants (n=17) were dating app users identifying as LGBTQIA+ or women (demographics at disproportionate risk of sexual violence). Participants envisioned dating apps encouraging safer consent exchange practices by normalizing discussions around consent and sexual boundaries online, before meeting face-to-face with potential sex partners. The design ideas generated by the participants, which we coded as Consent Communication Progression, involved the dating app messaging interface using AI-driven conversation prompts. Such prompts would gradually progress messaging conversations towards topics of consent and sexual boundaries with an algorithm that tailors the prompts to specific users. Participants applied a consent lens when imagining human-AI interaction, in which conversation prompts would only be posted in the interface if the user first consented to the particular conversation occurring. Implications for future work are discussed.