Is your match using ChatGPT to text you? Chatfishing, and how to spot it
The messages are good. Suspiciously good. Warm, funny, perfectly punctuated, asking exactly the right follow-up question at exactly the right moment. You've been on enough dating apps to know that nobody is this consistently charming at 11pm on a Tuesday. And yet here they are, being consistently charming at 11pm on a Tuesday.
Then you meet, and the person across the table can barely string a sentence together. The wit has gone. The questions have gone. Somewhere between the app and the pub, the person you were talking to disappeared, because the person you were talking to was never entirely a person.
Welcome to chatfishing.
What is chatfishing?
Chatfishing is when someone lets AI do their talking on a dating app. They paste your messages into ChatGPT or Claude, ask it to write a reply that sounds interested and a bit flirty, and send that. As Bloomberg put it when it reported on the trend this summer, the connection that develops over text is with the AI model's charm, not the person relying on it (Bloomberg). It's catfishing for the chat window. The face is real. The personality is borrowed. Medium
The word is new. The behaviour isn't, and it's spreading fast.
How many people are using AI to write their dating app messages?
More than you'd like. A February 2026 survey of 2,000 UK dating app users found that 32% use AI tools like ChatGPT to coach or write messages to potential partners (Sumsub). Roughly a third. So the next three matches you get, statistically, one of them has a robot on the bench. Sumsub
In the US, a Match Group and Kinsey Institute study found that 26% of adults have used AI for dating help, with far higher adoption among Gen Z, and Bloomberg reported that Google searches related to chatfishing have risen 5,000% (Global Dating Insights). One earlier US survey found one in three men aged 18 to 34 used ChatGPT for relationship advice, compared with 14% of women the same age (CNBC), which may explain why "is he using ChatGPT to text me" is a search term and "is she" mostly isn't. BloombergCNBC
Why does it matter if someone uses AI to message me?
Because the whole point of the talking stage is to find out what someone's actually like, and chatfishing breaks the instrument you're using to measure it. You're building a picture of a person from their words, and the words aren't theirs.
In one case Bloomberg reported, a woman spotted it when her Hinge match described her as having a kind of "energy" in a phrase no human would naturally produce; when confronted, he admitted using Claude. Another woman described a phone call where the man seemed to be reading from a script generated by running her profile through a chatbot (The Next Web). The AI version of someone is more articulate, more attentive and more consistent than the person who turns up to dinner. The gap between the two is the disappointment you feel on the date, and you can't un-feel it. YouTube
People know this, which is why the backlash is strong. In one survey, 58% of daters said using AI to write messages is a form of catfishing, 56% found AI-written pickup lines a bigger turn-off than bad grammar, and one in five had ghosted someone they suspected of using AI (Global Dating Insights). Researchers found that when people believed a dating profile was written with AI's help, it didn't make the writer seem less attractive, but it did make them seem significantly less trustworthy (OzCHI, ACM). And it's eroding trust in the whole thing: 84% of UK daters in the Sumsub survey said AI-generated content has made it harder to trust people or date successfully. Luxy + 2
Is it wrong to use ChatGPT on dating apps?
Depends what you're using it for. There's a fair line between editor and ghostwriter. If you wrote the message and AI tidied the grammar, or helped you phrase a kind no, you're still the author. If AI wrote the message so that your match thinks they're talking to you, that's the soft deception most people object to (Anketta). The honest test is simple: would you be comfortable saying you used it if asked? If the answer is "God, no", you already know. Anketta
And here's the quiet irony. Outsourcing your charm doesn't get you the date you want. It gets you a date with someone who likes a version of you that you can't be in person. That's a lot of admin for a bad evening.
Signs your match is using AI to write their messages
None of these is proof. Some people are just articulate. But if several show up together, trust your gut.
Every message is polished, punctuated and typo-free, at all hours, in a way that doesn't match their profile's writing.
Replies are long and nicely structured but oddly generic. They respond to the shape of what you said rather than the specifics.
Compliments come in templated constructions: "you have X energy", "I love that you Y". Slightly too smooth, slightly too often.
Em dashes. Lots of em dashes. Real people on dating apps use a comma and move on.
The tone changes when the medium changes. Brilliant in text, flat on a call, awkward in person. That gap is the tell.
They never quite answer a direct, specific question about themselves, but they always have a good question for you.
Why won't the dating apps fix it?
Because they mostly can't, and partly because they don't want to. The big platforms have policies against AI-manipulated photos but generally don't prohibit AI-generated text in messages, and Match Group's chief executive told Bloomberg that off-platform AI use is hard to control (Global Dating Insights). AI-detection tools exist but are unreliable, and no dating app has deployed one (The Next Web). Meanwhile the app makers are building their own AI into the experience (Moneywise). If AI keeps conversations alive, the app gets activity, and activity is what the app is measured on. Whether the person behind the message can hold that conversation at a pub in Clapham is your problem, not theirs. Bloomberg + 2
The one test that actually works: hear them
You can't ChatGPT a laugh. You can't outsource your own voice. The moment a conversation moves from typed words to a voice note, a phone call or a short video chat, chatfishing collapses, because the thing you're now judging is the actual person, unedited, in real time. Hinge's own data says that sending a voice note in a conversation makes a date 48% more likely, and 65% of daters say hearing someone's voice helps them decide whether they're interested (CNBC). Nobody's reading that stat and thinking "yes, but have you considered a robot could say it for them". CNBC
So if you're three days into a conversation that feels slightly too good, stop typing and ask for a voice note. If they're funny out loud, great. If the charm evaporates, you've saved yourself an evening.
Dating in London? You're not imagining it
London has more people on more apps running more conversations at once than anywhere else in the country, which makes it the natural home of anyone outsourcing their replies. When you're one of fifteen open chats, the temptation to let a machine hold the thread is obvious. The fix is the same: fewer conversations, and hear them early.
A dating app without the text box
We got fed up with all of it, so we built CheckIn, a new dating app with no text chat. Once you match, you talk: voice notes when you want to keep it low-key, a short video call when you're ready to actually meet the person. Five matches at a time, everyone verified, and nobody getting AI to do their flirting, because there's nothing to type. It's launching in London first, a batch at a time.
If the above sounded like your last three matches, the waitlist is here. Nobody on it is a chatbot. We checked.
Quick answers
What is chatfishing? Letting an AI tool like ChatGPT write your dating app messages so your match thinks they're talking to you. Catfishing, but for personality rather than photos.
How can I tell if someone is using ChatGPT on a dating app? Messages that are oddly polished and generic, templated compliments, plenty of em dashes, and a charm that vanishes the moment you hear their voice. None is proof. A voice note is.
Is there a dating app where people can't use AI to message? CheckIn has no text chat at all, just voice notes and video calls, so there's nothing for a chatbot to write. It launches in London first.