‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder | Dating

Standing outside the pub, 36-year-old business owner Rachel took a final tug on her vape and steeled herself to meet the man she’d spent the last three weeks opening up to. They’d matched on the dating app Hinge and built a rapport that quickly became something deeper. “From the beginning he was asking very open-ended questions, and that felt refreshing,” says Rachel. One early message from her match read: “I’ve been reading a bit about attachment styles lately, it’s helped me to understand myself better – and the type of partner I should be looking for. Have you ever looked at yours? Do you know your attachment style?” “It was like he was genuinely trying to get to know me on a deeper level. The questions felt a lot more thoughtful than the usual, ‘How’s your day going?’” she says.

Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

Which is why the man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. “I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she says. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me. That’s when I suspected he’d been using AI.”

Rachel gave her date the benefit of the doubt. “I thought maybe he was nervous,” she says. But she’d been “Chatfished” before, so when the gap between his real and digital selves failed to close on their second date, she called it off. “I’d already been ChatGPT-ed into bed at least once. I didn’t want it to happen again.”

Where once daters were duped by soft-focus photos and borrowed chat-up lines, now they’re seduced by ChatGPT-polished banter and AI-generated charm. Dating app fatigue is nothing new; for all its promise of convenience and unlimited choices, the gamified nature of finding love in the app age has, over the years, left many users feeling disposable. And, as AI becomes an ever more present feature of modern life – embedded into everything from healthcare systems to online grocery shopping – it’s adding yet another layer of digital artifice to the search for love.

In a landscape where text-based communication plays an outsized role in the search for love, it’s perhaps understandable that some of us reach for AI’s helping hand – not everyone gives good text. Some Chatfishers, though, go to greater extremes, outsourcing entire conversations to ChatGPT, leaving their match in a dystopian hall of mirrors: believing they’re building a genuine connection with another human being when in reality they’re opening up to an algorithm trained to reflect their desires back to them.

The majority of Chatfishers say they would never dream of letting AI do all of their talking. Most are like 38-year-old Londoner Nick, who sees it as a tool to help foster stronger connections with app matches. He works in tech and lives with his girlfriend; they’re in an open relationship and both date other people casually. He sometimes uses ChatGPT in his conversations on the dating apps Feeld and Bumble. “If I’m using a dating app,” he says, “I want to start a conversation that feels meaningful from the beginning so I can hook the other person in – but also I don’t want to spend too much time on it. Equally, while I want it to be ‘meaningful’, I don’t necessarily want to get super heavy and emotional straight away – it feels like quite a balancing act.” ChatGPT, he says, helps him tread that fine line: offering enough charm to spark a connection, without the investment of time or emotional labour that might otherwise feel wasted if the match fizzles out after a handful of messages.

For Nick, ChatGPT isn’t helpful “if I have a good connection with someone and the conversation is flowing – because what’s the point in using it then?” If, on the other hand, he’s matched with a person “and things are stalling, maybe the conversation has gotten a bit boring but the person is really hot or intriguing, then I might say, ‘Please find a good, engaging, funny answer to this to keep the conversation going.’” He never copies entire answers – “ChatGPT formulates things in a very obvious way,” he says – but he takes inspiration, or uses certain lines and phrases that sound most like him. Still, he admits there’s a subtle slippage when you start filtering yourself through a bot. “It might have generated some things I wouldn’t say or aren’t 100% me, but I went with them anyway. So, in that respect it probably has influenced what someone thinks about me,” he says. “But I don’t think it’s dishonest. I’m mostly me on the dating app – just maybe asking better questions.”

For the past three months, 28-year-old social worker Holly from Kent has been navigating a “situationship” with a co-worker. Though they knew each other from the office, they initially started speaking via LinkedIn. Now, they see each other sporadically – “I wouldn’t call them dates,” Holly deadpans – but speak often via WhatsApp. “I mainly use AI because I tend to write really long messages,” she says, “so I’ll put them into ChatGPT and say, ‘Please make this softer and more clear’, or, ‘I need to sound harsher here so he understands I’m upset.’” She doesn’t feel that it’s misleading – “I’m not trying to manipulate anyone,” she says.

Her story perhaps speaks to the fact that relationship dynamics have shifted in recent years. According to a 2024 YouGov poll, for instance, around half of Americans aged 18-34 reported having been, like Holly, in a situationship (a term it defines as “a romantic connection that exists in a gray area, neither strictly platonic nor officially a committed relationship”). At the same time, few of us have developed the communication skills to navigate the emotional grey areas thrown up by less stable relationship boundaries. For Holly, having her messages reshaped by AI means she can strike the right balance between honesty and tact: “Sometimes it helps me sound kinder when I’m angry.” Still, she says she would never tell her situationship that she uses AI to help her message him – “and I guess maybe he sees me as less reactive and more understanding because of how my messages are.”

As 32-year-old Rich points out, though, “it’s not like using ChatGPT guarantees success”. When he met someone in a bar one Friday night and swapped social media handles, he asked AI what his next move should be. ChatGPT discerned that sending an initial message on Monday midmorning would set the right pace. “Then it gave me some options for what the message could be,” says Rich. “Keep it light, warm, and low-stakes so it reads as genuine interest without urgency,” the bot advised. “Something like: Hey Sarah, still laughing about [tiny shared moment/reference if you’ve got one] – good to meet you!” Rich went back and forth with ChatGPT until he felt they’d hit upon exactly the right message (“Hey Sarah, it was lovely to meet you”) but sadly she never replied, he says. “It’s been two weeks now.”

When it’s obvious, the polish of ChatGPT can have the opposite effect to the intended. “I lose interest quickly,” says 35-year-old Nina, who works as an editor for a Serbian language website in Manchester. She was recently on the receiving end of an AI-generated opening line: “Your smile is effortlessly captivating”. “No one talks like that,” she says. She didn’t bother replying. She’s been single for three years and uses Hinge and Bumble. She has turned to AI herself to help improve her profiles: “It basically told me to sound more confident and positive,” she says. “I’ve also asked it for help with opening lines, especially when I didn’t know what to say. Once or twice I thought my matches were using it on me, too – their replies felt too polished, like they weren’t really listening. It’s helpful in some ways but it does make me wonder what’s real.”

Jamil, 25, from Leicester, admits he’s a prolific Chatfisher but argues that AI is simply a workaround for what he sees as the coded jargon of modern dating. “Like, what do you mean ‘What’s my attachment style?’” he balks. “Every girl on the apps has this thing about ‘love languages’ – it’s just gibberish, but if you don’t talk about it, people are like, ‘Oh you’re a red flag.’”

At first, he turned to ChatGPT in desperation. “It was just a quick thing,” he says. He works on an IT help desk and found himself trying to continue a conversation with a girl he wanted to impress while also swamped with work. “I asked ChatGPT what ‘avoidant style attachment’ meant because a girl was saying she’d been told this was her, and it explained, then added this prompt at the end like, ‘Do you want me to craft a reply?’ So I said yeah. I felt out of my depth and was also just really busy that day. I thought she was fit so I wanted to keep the momentum going.” The reply – “I think mine is ‘clingy but with snacks’, so maybe we’ll balance each other out” – proved effective. “She sent a few skull emojis, meaning she was dying laughing. I said I’d have to message her later because of work, and she replied asking if I wanted to meet – so yeah, it was, like, ‘Wow, this works.’”

Francesca, 33, owns a digital marketing agency in Cardiff. Like Jamil, she explains that ChatGPT grants her access to a world of inferences and subtext that she’d otherwise find impossible to navigate. “As an autistic woman in an era where the only way to meet anyone is through dating apps, I have struggled immensely. I found understanding tone and ‘the rules’ impossible and so ChatGPT has been really useful,” she says. When she started using it in a dating context it was more as a digital sounding board – an impartial presence that could give her feedback on her profile and offer a debrief after a date.

“I pasted all the Hinge prompts [the questions users fill in on their profile] into ChatGPT and said, ‘Knowing what you know of me, choose the best prompts and write a good answer,’” she says. The bot replied: “Based on everything I know about you – creative, self-aware, emotionally intelligent … I’d recommend choosing one of the following Hinge prompts ….”

She didn’t copy them exactly, Francesca says, but it gave her a lot of inspiration. Regardless, it still felt like her because the bot was taking what it knew about her from their daily exchanges – “AI is integrated into many parts of my business,” she says – and compressing it into the concise, playful language appropriate for a dating app. “It wasn’t writing me a new personality.”

It wasn’t until she’d matched with a man whom she found difficult to read that she began to deploy ChatGPT for messaging. “Our messages before we met had been really good [without any help from AI] but in person, he wasn’t very flirty or forward and didn’t try to kiss me at the end of our first date. I thought either he didn’t really fancy me or he was just trying to be respectful,” she says. She took screenshots of their last few exchanges, fed the messages and a short account of the date – a blustery walk around a lake – into ChatGPT, and asked it to read the room for her. The reply, helpfully clinical, suggested he was probably being respectful rather than uninterested, and recommended a light, open-ended follow-up. She sent a version of the suggested message, he replied enthusiastically, and they arranged a second date. “I was like, ‘Oh ChatGPT was right, he did want to see me again.’”

After that she found herself checking with the bot between every message, and requesting five variations before choosing the one that sounded most like her. “Over the course of a week, I realised I was relying on it quite a lot,” she says. “And I was like, you know what, that’s fine – why not outsource my love life to ChatGPT?”

By the time they’d been on their third date, though, “I was using ChatGPT for our entire communication,” says Francesca. “I wasn’t even replying any more – he was basically just dating ChatGPT.” In person, their dates still lacked spark. “I was very aware that I’d taken it too far but I felt like I was in too deep by that point. I didn’t know how to get out of it, I didn’t know how to talk to this person as myself any more.”

Jamil had a similar moment of dissonance sitting opposite a woman he’d Chatfished into a date. “Probably within a week of that first message I was using ChatGPT for every dating app exchange,” he says. On Discord, a chat platform popular with gamers and tech communities, he came across channels dedicated to AI where other single men were exchanging tips about how to prompt ChatGPT to generate effective dating messages. “So, for instance, someone said that if you start a chat with a girl by asking her a list of questions – favourite film, dream holiday, that kind of thing – then paste her answers into ChatGPT, it would craft replies that would make you sound like her perfect match.” It proved effective. “It got me a lot more dates than I was getting before.”

Chat GPT is a large language model (LMM), and the way LLMs work is by spotting patterns in language – the bot was picking up on keywords and themes in his match’s answers and weaving them into jokes, compliments or echoes of shared interests. Where Jamil might have left an awkward “nice” or “cool”, the bot would spin his match’s love of Bali into a playful, if somewhat unimaginative, line about coconut cocktails. It made him seem, at the very least, attentive. Jamil says he doesn’t feel he tricked anyone, he sees it more as hacking the apps themselves. “Dating apps put everyone at a disadvantage – you’re competing with hundreds of other people for attention, and half the time the chats die after two or three messages. If ChatGPT helps me stand out, why wouldn’t I use it?”

Still, there was one date that pricked his conscience. He was doing the usual copy-and-paste, letting ChatGPT do the heavy lifting, “when a girl started talking about how she’d had a bereavement in her family”. ChatGPT navigated her grief with composure, synthesising the kind of sympathy that made Jamil seem like a model of emotional literacy. “It said something like, ‘I’m so sorry you’re going through this, it must be really difficult – thank you for trusting me with it,’” Jamil recalls. When he met the girl in real life, she noted how supportive he’d been in his messages. “I felt bad – I think that was the only time I thought it was kind of dishonest. I didn’t tell her I’d used ChatGPT but I really tried to message her myself after that.”

Recently he says he’s been caught out more often. “I’ll get people saying point blank, ‘This sounds bait’, even if I’m not just copy-and-pasting. More people are using AI now so they can spot it. I think the golden age of just letting it do all your messaging has passed.”

Francesca had a wake-up call when a simple mistake nearly gave the game away. She pasted a wry message scripted by ChatGPT into her WhatsApp chat with a date, only to realise it ended with the telltale bot prompt: “Do you want me to make this punchier?” It wasn’t until his baffled reply – “What do you mean?” – that she realised her mistake. “I just thought, Oh God, I’ve been caught,” she says. She left his question unanswered for a few hours, until deciding the only option was to style it out by pretending that part was meant for a co-worker.

“We went on one more date afterwards but I wasn’t sure if he was interested in me or not, so I just let it go. I thought, ‘I’m not up for having to analyse every interaction to see if he’s into me.’ And anyway, by that point, 90% of the messages he’d had off me had been by ChatGPT so it wasn’t like we’d properly gotten to know each other – he was basically dating the AI.”

For Paul C Brunson, dating guru and one of the experts currently guiding contestants on Married at First Sight UK, there’s a clear line between using AI as a tool and actively lying. “AI is amazing and it has the potential to help a lot of people – of course it depends on the degree to which someone is relying on it and the purpose behind why they’re using it. For many, it’s simply an enhancement that will allow them to connect with others more easily.” For him, the ultimate dating advice will always be to meet your matches as soon as possible. “It’s the best way to determine if you’re a viable match – you get to observe their behaviour and see if they seem trustworthy. You know, were they consistent in their word? Did they show up when they said they would? Did you feel like you were physically attracted to them? How was the communication when you were sitting opposite them? AI doesn’t impact any of that – AI is the tool to help facilitate the meetup.” Equally, though, he says that most of us know that “fully misrepresenting who you are – lying, basically,” has no place in modern dating. “And I think the vast majority of people would know when they’ve crossed that line.”

The problem, as Rachel sees it, is that some people will cross that line deliberately. “Before the advent of AI, it was like, OK, maybe you don’t look like your pictures,” she says, “and that’s annoying but you’d quickly be caught out. Now though, people are putting forward entirely new personas.” She describes being on the receiving end of the kinds of techniques that Jamil uses – being drilled with questions, “like you’re answering an HR questionnaire”, then off the back of those answers “having conversations where it feels as if the other person has a tap on my phone because everything they say is so perfectly suited to me”.

The worst, she says, was the time she matched with a handsome man. “It’s an awful generalisation – but I thought he would be all looks and no substance,” she admits. It was a pleasant surprise, then, when their digital conversation flowed easily and she realised they had a lot in common. “I thought I’d found the perfect man. At one point, I talked about how much I loved going on walks and he was like, ‘I know this place with amazing lavender fields, I’m going to take you there.’ I mean, I was used to dating people who didn’t even get me a card on my birthday – and this man was offering to take me to lavender fields? I felt he was really listening to me.”

Their date went well, carried on a tide of high spirits from days of intense messaging. “We got pretty intoxicated and did sleep together – I was just swept away by it all,” she says. After that date, though, the messages changed – the flowing sentences filled with questions and quips, the bullet-point lists of books she might like and places they should visit, were replaced by terse one-word replies, sent after long delays. She showed the conversation to a friend, who was the first person to point out that many of his messages bore the hallmarks of having been generated by ChatGPT. She’d never used AI and so wasn’t on the lookout for the distinctive cadences and long dashes. “Maybe I was naive, but when you’re looking for love and someone comes along who says the right things, seems to be on the same page as you, you aren’t thinking, ‘He must be a bot’, you’re thinking you’ve just stumbled across Prince Charming.”

If ghosting was the defining hazard of early app dating, Chatfishing may be its AI-age successor. The rise of ChatGPT in our romantic lives might simply be a symptom of burnout: after years of swiping and stilted exchanges, who wouldn’t be tempted by a digital dating coach, promising wit on tap? Dating apps encourage us to treat romance like a market, full of infinite choice, where we are products to be optimised. AI simply extends that logic – and if the right line, the right cadence, can buy us a little more attention, why wouldn’t we use it?

But the secrecy around it is revealing. That so many daters are hiding their reliance on AI suggests that deep down we all know that true intimacy demands vulnerability. Having a chatbot mediate our flirtations – even just in the early stages – risks dimming that intangible spark that only arises in unscripted moments. Worse still, as Rachel’s lavender-field disappointment shows, the drive for more matches, quicker, can leave others feeling used, misled, even doubting what’s real. And dating is perhaps just a test case; as AI seeps further into every corner of our lives, the temptation to neaten the messiness, to smooth the hesitations and flaws that make us human, will surely grow. What happens when no exchange is person-to-person any more? When we’re all talking into echo chambers, hearing our own words reflected back at us?

Ultimately, there is no shortcut to connection. “Dating apps are kind of mislabelled,” says Brunson. “They should more appropriately be called ‘introduction apps’, because they’re really only designed to introduce you to potential matches. The rest needs to be done in person – that’s where you find if you have chemistry. And no algorithm can do that part for us.”