"Chatfishing" is the new texting hack getting people more dates. There's just one problem.

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I knew something was fundamentally broken with modern dating when a guy on Hinge sent me a message entirely enclosed in quotation marks.

My bio mentioned that I don't like gin martinis, and his opener read: "Hey Em, lovely to match with you. I have to admit, I really like gin martinis".

My immediate thought wasn't 'wow, what a conversationalist,' but rather, 'did you just copy and paste that from a robot?'.

The whole exchange felt so jarringly formal, so scripted, that I almost replied asking if he needed me to cite his sources. As it turns out, my suspicions were probably correct. He'd likely put my profile into an AI bot for prompts and lazily pasted the first option it spat out (punctuation and all).

This, my friends, is the strange new world of 'chatfishing', the latest trend to make you want to throw your phone into the sea.

It's catfishing's nerdy, emotionally unavailable cousin, where people are using Artificial Intelligence, like ChatGPT, to craft their dating app messages for them. Instead of presenting a fake photo, they're presenting a fake personality that has been engineered by a program to be the perfect person.

Watch: I explain what chatfishing is on the Mamamia Out Loud podcast. Post continues below.

And I'm not the only one who's encountered it. A friend told me about her recent experience with a 'chatfisher' she'd met through mutual friends.

"The text messages he would send me were paragraphs long, and I couldn't understand where all this content was coming from. He would send these messages with all these very intricate, detailed questions that felt a bit unnatural," she said.

When they finally met up for a drink, the vibe was… different.

"In person he was wayyy more shy," she said. "I do feel like I carried a lot of the convo, and then if he was telling stories I just had a feeling he was embellishing and dazzling up details".

"The digital Shakespeare who penned lengthy, thoughtful messages was suddenly quiet. He definitely just matched my energy, nothing more or nothing less. Sometimes you just know and have a feeling".

Wait. It gets better…

Her suspicions were confirmed when he accidentally left the AI prompt at the top of his last message to her. CRINGE.

Listen to the author of this piece talk about 'chatfishing' on the Mamamia Out Loud podcast. Post continues below.

Look, I get the temptation. Dating is an exhausting performance. We're all tired. Maybe outsourcing our flirting to an algorithm is the next logical step in human evolution. Why waste precious brain cells trying to think of a funny response to "wyd" when a robot can do it for you?

However, it's one thing to ask your bestie if your reply sounds too keen; it's another to have a robot manufacture your entire personality. As one woman in an article discovered, the guy who was sending her emotionally intelligent texts about attachment styles was a conversational brick wall in real life. You're setting an expectation that the real, human you simply can't meet.

What happens on the first date when you can't subtly type "What is a funny but insightful follow-up question to her story about her childhood dog?" under the table? The disconnect is inevitable. You've chatfished someone into liking a version of you that doesn't exist offline. It's a bait-and-switch.

One man was quoted in The Guardian saying he uses it because, "I want to start a conversation that feels meaningful from the beginning so I can hook the other person in," before adding, "but also, I don't want to spend too much time on it". And that, right there, is the problem. It's not about connection; it's about a low-effort hack to get a result.

Ultimately, we're all just looking for some form of genuine connection.

We want to be liked for our weird, awkward, sometimes-not-that-funny selves. Relying on AI to get you dates feels like starting a relationship on a foundation of fraud. It screams a lack of confidence, and honestly, it's extremely misleading.

So, next time you're staring at that blinking cursor, take a deep breath and resist the urge to consult the bot. Send that slightly awkward message. Use the wrong emoji. Make a joke that doesn't quite land. At least you will be you.

And if they don't like it, well, it's their loss.

If you want more from Emily Vernem, you can follow her on Instagram @emilyvernem.

Feature image: Canva.