If Your Partner Seems Too Perfect, They May Be Catfishing You With AI

Key Points

• AI is being used to enhance users' dating profiles and improve their matching potential.
• AI tools are particularly appealing to men in the realm of dating, according to research.
• A potential drawback is people could perceive connections facilitated by AI as disingenuous or lacking emotional authenticity.

Proponents of artificial intelligence have been making a lot of promises about how the technology can improve your love life—from dating AI chatbots to ChatGPT pickup lines and virtual matchmakers. A TikTok user even caught her boyfriend cheating on her by using AI to clone his voice.

So how can you tell if your dating app match, a person who seems too good to be true, is actually just an AI? How can you use these new virtual tools to aid your dating life?

AI can help you get better matches

Small profile changes can render an "enormous, immediate impact" concerning results, according to Amanda Bradford, the Austin, Texas-based CEO and founder of the dating app The League. Bradford said she has been her guy friends' "go-to person" to improve their profiles.

"This is where I see the potential for AI to come in," Bradford said. "I shouldn't need to manually pick photos for every single friend."

Tinder recently announced it will let AI pick out the most flattering photos for your profile. The League is exploring ways to use artificial intelligence to optimize its matching potential by helping users improve their profiles and to upgrade the app's matching algorithm.

Men like the idea of using AI to message women

Studies on the impact of AI tools and dating are limited, with most research conducted on heterosexual cisgender men. In one 2023 survey, about 27 percent of the 1,371 male respondents said they had a positive experience using AI to create their bios and send messages to preferred matches on dating apps.

These men said using AI tools made them feel more confident about how they were presenting themselves on the app and how they were talking to their matches. They also said they had better response rates from their matches.

In an internal April 2023 poll among 638 men carried out by MGAI: The AI Wingman For Online Dating, about 74 percent of men were into the idea of using AI to message women, and only 7 percent of men who used ChatGPT for dating advice found it useful.

"We then concluded that AI is going to be very popular for the male side of online daters, but we also concluded that ChatGPT was not good enough for online dating because it's not developed by dating experts and doesn't have the appropriate data for what men are actually looking to gain from using AI for online dating," said Ice White, the London-based creator of dating tool MGAI: The AI Wingman For Online Dating.

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Could this take the romance out of dating?

AI may be a useful tool to improve your profile, but some people think these connections are "disingenuous," and many even find it "unethical" that dating apps are using this technology in this way.

"It's all about user experience and whether people feel they are achieving real human connections on platforms seemingly infiltrated by AI wherever you look," said Mary Smith, the founder of wedding planning site Vowness in Dallas. "The platforms that win are those apps that'll take such grievances seriously."

AI could literally make you seem like you're a robot

"Over-reliance on AI can make you come off as robotic and emotionally empty because AI doesn't have the capacity for emotional intelligence or emotional intimacy," Smith said. "There's also the possibility that you'll struggle to communicate and express yourself while on face-to-face dates as you're so used to AI doing the talking for you."

About 22 percent of men interested in using AI chatbots for online dating said they wished AI could do all of the talking, according to the MGAI 2023 poll.

"This could really hurt the people who take this route because using it as a disguise and then showing up on a date without consciously knowing why you're meeting or what was talked about might just make the date weird and awkward," White said. "The conversation probably wouldn't be genuine. This might just make the act of meeting less desirable."

AI can produce even more convincing catfish

Professionals are using AI headshot generators to create polished photos for their LinkedIn profiles, so there is no doubt dating app profiles will be next. While we're used to overly filtered photos on dating apps, these AI headshots might be more difficult to spot.

"Catfishing incidents will also skyrocket," Smith said. "Neither the dating app users nor the platforms themselves are ready for the influx of complex AI-driven catfishing that will be unleashed on these spaces. There's bound to be a lot of pain before this phenomenon is brought under control, if ever. This could seriously jeopardize the sustainability of dating app business models."

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Some dating apps are already looking out for this potential threat, including The League, to weed out bad actors.

"It was important to me that we create an authenticated community––using LinkedIn and more layers of verification––because that meant people in the community would feel safer," Bradford said. "And safety is what makes authentic connection possible."

How to catch an AI catfish

If you can't tell if your match is a human or letting AI do all the talking, here are some artificial intelligence red flags, according to experts:

• Grammatically correct sentences with no spelling errors with perfect placement of punctuation and emojis
• Consistent, generic and very logical messages
• Repetitive answers
• Inability to respond to personal questions
• Lack of emotional depth in conversations
• Cheesy one-liners
• Too-perfect photos
• Messages received at strange times or immediately

"To keep yourself safe, practice good online communication hygiene, meaning don't share personal information with matches until you are sure they are who they say they are," Smith said.

Should you use AI in your dating life?

AI can be a great tool to improve your experience on a dating app, but it could backfire.

"People should approach the use of AI in the same way they should be approaching dating. Be really intentional," Bradford said. "AI can be really helpful but you should leverage AI as a useful tool, not rely on it to carry a conversation for you or change who you are."