Dating app profiles have always been a little generous with the truth. The height rounds up, and the photos are from three years and one haircut ago. Now the charming person on the other end of the chat might not even be writing their own messages.

Scientific American calls it chatfishing, and AI is becoming increasingly common in dating. According to a 2025 study from Match and the Kinsey Institute, 26% of singles were using AI to help with their dating lives, a 333% increase from the previous year. Another survey from Norton found 60% of online daters suspected they’d already received AI-written messages from a match. The other 40% might just be giving people too much credit.

You can understand the temptation. Dating apps are exhausting, and coming up with something charming to say to a stranger for the seventh time this week gets old. As Kinsey Institute executive director Justin Garcia told NBC Washington, “Dating is in many ways about competition.” And AI has gotten pretty convincing. In one study, people chatting with GPT-4.5 and a human mistook the AI for the human 73% of the time.

What Is ‘Chatfishing’? The AI Dating Trend That’s Fooling Singles Online.

The deception can extend to profile pictures, too. Kylee Baxa told CNN about meeting a man whose dating profile was full of photos from Mykonos. Except he’d never been there. When she asked about it, he admitted he’d used AI to create the photos because he didn’t have enough good ones. “Like, they’re still me. It’s still my face,” she recalled him saying. She left shortly afterward, obviously unimpressed by his imaginary Greek vacation.

People are getting fed up with all of this. A Boston University survey found half of respondents thought dating apps had too many chatbots pretending to be people. Only 10% of women believed AI-powered dating apps would lead to more successful relationships.

BU media science professor Kathryn Coduto raised another concern with CNN. “I do worry for people who have a great interaction, but it ends up being with an AI,” she said. “And then when they meet the person, it’s not who they thought it was.”

There’s something to be said for meeting someone in person before you’ve spent a month getting attached to their texts. You could always start with a phone call, too. And while photo verification helps confirm someone’s identity, it doesn’t mean they’re the one coming up with all those clever replies.

Remember when the biggest concern was whether someone looked like their pictures? Now we’re questioning if they even have the personality we’ve been talking to.

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