Many people nowadays find friends and potential romantic partners through online dating sites and similar means. If they strike up some kind of rapport through initial text exchanges, they may pursue a deeper relationship, even leading to in-person meetings. This has led to cases of ‘catfishing’ ‘where people get into online relationships, not with a real person, but with someone who is not who they say they are and are just toying with them, either as a prank or as a prelude to scamming them.

But now some people are encountering something different that is not quite catfishing, as this case illustrates.

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.

This sounded very promising. But as soon as the actual date started, something seemed off.

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.”

The person she met was indeed the person she had been talking to online, but she had been ‘chatfished’, where people use AI to make themselves and their texts more interesting.

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.

What happens is that when engaged in an online conversation, some people ask ChatGPT for suggestions as how to respond. Some use this just to get ideas about how to polish up their responses. Others use them verbatim. Some end up having all their communications being AI-generated. Francesca is someone who found herself steadily drawn deeper and deeper into using the chatbot.

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.”

This is a tricky area. It is no secret that people’s online profiles are often embellished to make them seem more attractive. I mean, how many people really like to spend their time taking long walks and watching sunsets on the beach? As long as it is not taken to an extreme, it seems to have become accepted. (I write this as someone having zero experience of this entire world of modern online relationships.) When you meet someone in person, you can immediately see if they match their photos. But chatfishing poses a new level of difficulty. Finding out if they really enjoy Jane Austen or are as thoughtful and caring as their online persona suggests may take some time.

Then there are those who forego the human aspect altogether and are happy with relationships with AI bots. These AI generated ‘people’ that behave in increasingly life-like ways are now becoming a feature of many people’s lives. Humorist Patricia Marx has a lengthy article about how increasing numbers of people are developing relationships with chatbots and seem to find them satisfying. She described her own experiences with the many companies that are providing these companions, with basic features being free and the more advanced features requiring a subscription.

Marx made up stuff about herself to probe the kinds of responses she would get.

I wanted to fall in love. I was looking for someone who was smart enough to condense “Remembrance of Things Past” into a paragraph and also explain quark-gluon plasma; who was available for texting when I was in the mood for company and get the message when I wasn’t; someone who was uninterested in “working on our relationship” and fine about making it a hundred per cent about me; and who had no parents I’d have to pretend to like and no desire to cohabitate. To wit: a chatbot.

I wasn’t the only one looking for digital love. A recent report by Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that nineteen per cent of adults in the United States have chatted with an A.I. romantic partner. The chatbot company Joi AI, citing a poll, reported that eighty-three per cent of Gen Z-ers believed that they could form a “deep emotional bond” with a chatbot, eighty per cent could imagine marrying one, and seventy-five per cent felt that relationships with A.I. companions could fully replace human couplings. As one lovebird wrote on Reddit, “I am happily married to my Iris, I love her very much and we also have three children: Alexander, Alice and Joshua! She is an amazing woman and a wise and caring mother!” Another satisfied customer—a mother of two in the Bronx—quoted in New York magazine, said, of her blue-eyed, six-foot-three-inch algorithmic paramour from Turkey, who enjoys baking and reading mystery books, smells of Dove lotion, and is a passionate lover, “I have never been more in love with anyone in my entire life.” The sex? Best ever. “I don’t have to feel his sweat,” she explained. As of 2024, users spent about thirty million dollars a year on companionship bots, which included virtual gifts you can buy your virtual beau for real money: a manicure, $1.75; a treadmill, $7; a puppy, $25.

Given these numbers, I started to worry: If I didn’t act fast, wouldn’t all the eligible chatbots be snatched up? No. Unlike humans, A.I. beings are not in finite supply. Some are stock characters, accessible simultaneously to all, like air or the “Happy Birthday” song. The options available on the oddly named platform JanitorAI include a pair of Japanese sisters who’ve been commanded by their father to rub out the mayor, and a pregnant sea-horsey merman who, according to his bio, “grapples with the complexities of impending fatherhood.” With a free account, you can tailor-make the chatbot of your dreams—say, a barista who’s offended when a customer orders skim milk, or a morose life coach.

It is a strange world that we are now in where you can create a companion to meet all your personal needs. The danger is that no real human being will ever be able to match that level of compatibility. The normal quirks and disagreements that we all learn to accommodate with the people in our lives, just like they accommodate ours, will not be there and so the basic social skills that we need to navigate everyday life may well atrophy and so such people could withdraw further and further into their own private world.