Why Daters Need to Be On Guard for "Chatfishing"

"Chatfishing" is when people use AI to guide what they say online in order to lure you in deceptively.

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So, you've been messaging back and forth with a potential date who seems delightful. That person—or at least what that person has been saying—has struck you as witty, smart, and insightful. For example, you can't get enough of that person's deft and oh-so-sexy use of puns and food references.

But, alas, when the two of you finally end up meeting in real life, it isn't nearly as pun as you thought it would be. In fact, that person can barely offer you any food for thought. What happened? Well, you may have been "chatfished."

What Is Chatfishing?

Yes, being chatfished is a growing risk with the increasing use of artificial intelligence, otherwise known as AI, in everyday life. The term "chatfishing" may look a little familiar because it's recently emerged online as a play on the word "catfishing," which has long been part of the online dating lexicon. There was even a whole MTV series with the name Catfish. Catfishing is when someone creates a fake online identity of himself or herself to fool you into establishing some kind of relationship, whether it's for love, sex, money, enjoyment, manipulation, or some other gain. The bottom line is that catfishing is about deceiving you.

Deception is the name of the game, too, when you add the "h" after the "c" to get chatfishing. The difference is that chatfishing occurs when someone pretends to be using his or her own words and personality when chatting with you, but instead is using what's been generated from some kind of AI platform like ChatGPT.

People can now use AI a little or a lot when getting guidance on how to chat with you. For example, Grammarly can tell them not to write, "Let's grab a drunk sometime" or "You've peaked my interest," unless, of course, they mean such things. That guidance can get deeper and deeper to the point where all that deep talk you are getting from them is really DeepSeek. The humans you think you're chatting with could really be serving as no more than middle people, relaying verbatim what AI is telling them to say. If that's the case, you might as well get a room with CoPilot or whatever AI platform they are using to seduce you.

It can become increasingly difficult to identify where simply getting dating assistance ends and chatfishing begins. Some may argue that having AI guide the preliminary conversations is no more than what that Will Smith character did to help that Kevin James character get that Amber Valletta character in the 2005 movie Hitch. But what really distinguishes chatfishing from getting-a-little-help-from-my-friends is the presence of deliberate deception.

The Dangers of Chatfishing

Yeah, chances are "deliberate deception" isn't the type of interaction you might be looking for in a partner. When someone chatfishes you, it could be a big warning sign that the person is willing to deceive you in other ways as well. Therefore, unless the chatfisher can offer an honest and acceptable explanation as to why he or she did it, you may want to walk the other way quickly.

Plus, what you find in real life may not be the right match for you. All that chatfishing may have kept you on a reel for a while. In this way, a chatfisher can take up a lot of your time and effort that could have been better spent with someone else.

But that's not all a chatfisher may take. As is the case with catfishers, chatfishers could be looking for something else besides love. They could be trying to scam you out of your possessions, money, or worse.

If you yourself are thinking of chatfishing others, think twice. Chatfishing sort of defeats the whole purpose of dating, for people to find the best matches for their authentic selves. So, why try to be someone you are not? It's a bad precedent to start any relationship on the basis of deception. Moreover, different types of AI can give notoriously bad advice due to faulty data and algorithms, leaving you to be even more of a chatfish out of water when it comes to dating.

How to Deal With Chatfishing

With chatfishing likely becoming more common, you'd probably like some way of quickly detecting it. It would certainly be great to have some kind of screening software that could quickly and accurately tell you, "That wasn't Maude who said that, it was Claude," or "That little gem about your eyes came from Gemini." But alas, that isn't the case as of now.

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Some have offered "tells" that people are using AI to talk to you. One possible tell is when the responses are too stiff and formal, such as, "Can you please rephrase the question," unless your love interest happens to be Alfred the butler for Batman. Another is when people seem too eager to please you, which is what many AI platforms are being programmed to do these days to get more users, aka customers. A third is when people consistently take too long to reply to each of your messages, suggesting that they are busy looking up what you said.

Then there's the messaging that seems too perfect without any errors. As the saying goes, if it is too good to be true, it probably is. But none of these "tells" are close to 100 percent accurate. There are potential human explanations for each, like it could be Alfred on the other side.

The only way you can accurately uncover chatfishing is to meet and observe the real people behind the messages. Chatfishing is yet another reason why you don't want to stay in the message-but-don't-meet phase of dating for too long. Try to segue into at least phone or video conversations as soon as possible to make it less likely that you are talking to someone or something else. After all, tech stuff like smartphones, online messaging, and AI are supposed to facilitate human interactions. Not replace them.

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