October 22, 2025
4 min reading
So you fell in love with a robot: chatfishing takes over dating apps
Forget Fake Profile Pictures on Dating Apps: AI Now Speaks and We Can’t Tell the Difference
Donald Iain Smith/Getty Images
It’s a well-known adage of the Internet age: people are often not who they seem online. But until recently, we could at least be assured that they were people. But today, “chatfishing,” a new wave of online deception, is taking over dating apps. Instead of “catfishing” – using an entirely fake identity – people are using artificial intelligence to help them discuss potential love interests and get dates.
And the technology to help them achieve this is booming. People using dating apps can copy and paste their potential date’s messages into chatbots such as ChatGPT, or give them screenshots of text conversations, to ask for advice. “Wingman apps” such as Rizz, Winggg and YourMove AI suggest replies to uploaded screenshots of incoming messages; YourMove AI’s marketing claims it “puts your text messages on cruise control.” Some dating platforms are also adopting AI coaching. Hinge uses an AI-powered tool to encourage users to give better responses to its prompts without generating a script, and Facebook Dating is testing a “dating assistant” to brainstorm dating ideas. Volar, a dating app launching in late 2023, even lets people train an AI version of themselves that flirts with someone else’s AI as a pre-screening, like two emissaries making small talk before the generals sit down. (Volar closed its doors in 2024, suggesting that humans still want some level of involvement in their dating choices.)
A recent survey conducted by Match and researchers at the Kinsey Institute found that 26 percent of U.S. singles said they use AI to improve their dating, an increase of 333 percent from the previous year. A Norton study carried out in 2025 confirms this: six out of 10 people who use dating apps think they have encountered at least one conversation written by AI. And Time reported that the Rizz app attracted around 1.5 million monthly active users last year.
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Many dating app users report corresponding with people who were engaging through texting but were bored in person, but there are no studies showing whether catfishers get more dates. Science, however, suggests that people have difficulty distinguishing between text written by a human and text written by a machine. In a 2024 study, humans were only about 57% accurate in determining whether snippets of news articles were written by humans or AI, and a 2025 pre-print paper showed that human judges who chatted simultaneously with OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 model and a human mistook the AI for a human 73% of the time.
Even outside of a dating context, AI often ends up seducing people: An MIT Media Lab analysis of a fast-growing Reddit community called r/MyBoyfriendIsAI found that romantic attachment is often involuntary when using chatbots. People come for practical help, like help with writing or problem solving, and stay for company. Soon there are pet names, goodnight texts, and then heartbreak as the model updates and the chatbot’s personality drifts.
A man-machine romance can be off-putting but shouldn’t be surprising. ChatGPT was, as the name suggests, designed for chatting, and there is plenty of research showing that humans create connections through communication. But if the connection is so fundamentally human, why do we need help from machines?
The answer is that with dating apps, we are in the computer’s territory – it’s not our home domain. We evolved to speak in person, with gestures, facial expressions, body language, and eye contact, all helping others complete the half-finished thoughts we sometimes express. Dating apps (and all chatbot conversations, really) favor machines, not only because they reduce our embodied lives to text, but also because, over the last half century, computers have been optimized to appear as perfectly human as possible.
The classic test of computational intelligence, proposed by British computing pioneer Alan Turing in 1950, is a lot like a romantic conversation. In the Turing test, a judge communicates by SMS with two invisible interlocutors – a human, a machine – and tries to tell them apart. If the judge fails, the machine “passes”. Year after year, engineers compete to create chatbots that can succeed. It wasn’t until 2024 that models started outperforming humans, and by 2025, as previously mentioned, ChatGPT was fooling judges over 70% of the time.
And the deeper problem is that, for decades, even when machines broke down, humans often broke down too, appearing mechanical, repetitive, or generic. Now, on dating apps, Turing tests take place in real time. A woman sends messages to two matches; one writes the responses while the other lets a robot manage the exchange. If she arranges a meeting with the AI, this system has just passed.
Author Brian Christian explored this irony in his 2011 book The most human humanwho recounts his experience competing with chatbots in the Turing tests. His advice for standing out as decidedly human was to be gloriously embodied. Don’t say you like music; let’s say you cried when you heard the second verse. Don’t say you like dogs; Describe your childhood Doberman who slept in the hammock out of fear of the Roomba. “The statistical, cultural, and ritual regularities of human interaction are the weaknesses that these machines exploit,” he writes.
Even though modern life, with its endless messages, favors machines, asking for their help is not a way to find love. As studies and stories from the dating trenches show, our romantic interests may fall into AI’s trap, but not us. Perhaps the solution is to let go of saying the right things and just be real, giving and pursuing what is true, imperfect and undeniably human.
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