Imagine: You like someone and begin your conversation with them over WhatsApp or another chat platform. Their replies are funny, witty, thoughtful, and intellectual, just in the right amount that they sweep you off your feet. Then, you decide to go on a date and find that the person you have been crushing over is the opposite of their personality in the messages.
The official term for this is chatfishing (yes! That's correct). With the advent of AI (artificial intelligence), bots are entering every aspect of life, even dating. You thought AI was being trained to take over your job, but what it is doing is stealing your humanity and skills, only to leave you feeling hollow and not good enough.
What Is Chatfishing?
Chatfishing, which sounds like catfishing, is a new trend in the dating world. People who are either lazy or find themselves struggling to string words into a decent sentence use AI to reply to the texts of their partners and impress them.
If someone is chatfishing, their sentences will be grammatically perfect, error-free.
They would rather share a screenshot of the chat with tools like ChatGPT, Wingman AI, Rizz AI, and fish for an answer, copy it, paste it, and press send. In layman's terms, AI has become every person's F.R.I.E.N.D.S group to whom they go for dating advice, or MacLaren's Pub (from How I Met Your Mother), where you meet your friends and talk about your love life.
There was a time when a person would ask their friends about what to say on text to sound cool, but not anymore. All you need is an application. But the question is whether it is an ethical approach.
Disadvantages Of Catfishing
This dating trend is cool as long as you are genuinely trying to impress someone without hiding your true self. Clearing a few doubts, coming up with a cheeky pick-up line, or even writing half-baked poetry is fine.
However, when your real personality and on-message persona are in juxtaposition, that's when the trend pushes you down a steep slope. The whole point of chatting with someone is to connect with them, so you share a level of comfort while talking in person or meeting.
When either of the partners (or both) is using AI, they are fooling the person they want to impress. At the end, the bubble of charisma bursts when two people decide to meet.
On paper, it looks like there is no major disadvantage to chatfishing, but in reality, it is a waste of time. Even if your intentions are right, you are not being real with the other person, and they might consider you dishonest (and you can't blame them).
On the other side, chatfishers might be criminals trying to build a connection with you, only to retrieve monetary benefits.
Either way, why would you want to be anyone else but you in front of your partner?
How To Deal With Chatfishing?
For casual answers, it might be difficult to figure out whether a person is chatfishing or actually chatting. However, look for references.
You thought AI was being trained to take over your job, but it is crashing into your dating life.
When genuinely messaging, people don't use hoity-toity-toity references unless you are talking to a literature graduate. Most of us type simple sentences and use references from our favourite movie or series.
Humans make errors (even if someone is an expert in a language). Sometimes your thumbs slip, you forget to press the space bar, you misspell a word (God forbid), or you use everyday slang and abbreviations. If someone is chatfishing, their sentences will be grammatically perfect, error-free. That's your clue to confront the person (and ghost or better block them after confirmation).
However, the best (tried and tested) method to figure out chatfishing is to meet someone. Spend some time with your partner to figure out whether they are real on text or have ulterior motives.
Dating is supposed to be fun, but it is hard with AI rash driving into our love lives.
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