AI image manipulations and online dating

Over the last few years the statistics show a great growth in the number of people who are meeting people via online dating. Of course if you looked back a few decades the numbers were zero because online dating didn't exist. But since the early days the percentage of people who are in relationships that met online has increased steadily with a large contribution to that number coming from online dating apps.

If you were to extrapolate these trends it might seem that online dating will continue to grow.

However I think we have reached the peak for many forms of online dating apps and that technological developments will cause online dating to fall apart entirely on its own following this current trajectory. In particular the dating apps that are based on a swipe left vs swipe right dynamic will be in the most trouble given recent technological advances.

What is catfishing

Catfishing is the act of creating fake online personas with the explicit intent of deception. Catfishing is when you arrange an online date and turn up to see someone who is not who they were representing themselves to be. This is one of those dark things about the realm of online dating that people tend to avoid thinking about because its too brutal for many people to handle. So as a result most people don't talk about it.

Unfortunately if you are on social media or online dating sites in 2024 it is inevitable that you run into fake accounts frequently. This is particularly obvious in the political sector where huge numbers of fake accounts are created to push various narratives in an astroturfed manner. Then there's a number of frauds where the motivation is not to persuade but rather to extract money. It is common knowledge that emails are a way fraudsters contact potential victims, there's now even people who have a hobby of deliberately wasting the time of such fraudsters. Some fraudsters are now using online dating platforms as their way to contact potential targets. Knowledge of this became mainstream after The Tinder Swindler story blew up.

Online dating apps know that fraud and scams happen on their platforms, they directly profit from the increased users numbers. One of the ways they profit is from charging users to use "travel mode" features, this allows international scammers to target people in other countries for their scams. But these platforms have to appear to do something about it because their users don't like being deceived and will leave the sites out of disgust if they think the platforms are complicit in facilitating fraud. Even if users don't suspect the platform there's only so much fraud people will tolerate before they give up on a platform. It's frustrating having to filter out fake accounts. As a result many online platforms have offered the option to "verify" your photo, which is a way of showing that the photos in your profile are actually photos of you. For now you will encounter vastly fewer fraudulent accounts if you use the image verification as a filter. However because a lot of real people are too lazy to verify their photos you will miss out on real people too by using these filters. Many people are currently assuming that if an account is verified then all the photos are real photos of the user, however they won't be making this assumption in a few years time for reasons I'll explain later in the article.

"optimizing" dating profiles

In the post-Tinder era online dating has continually transformed into more and more of a hellscape where it is all about shallow impressions formed in the blink of an eye. Opinions are formed in ever decreasing amounts of time based on a few images of a person, opinions that can deeply influences the entire trajectories of peoples's lives sometimes in irreversible ways¹. If you don't immediately catch someones eye in this "attention economy" you are quickly scrolled past and ignored, regardless of how much value you could have provided. In this online social media era initial impressions are having a disproportionate impact on everything. This social media era has given rise to the preeminence of images that represent people, the ascendancy of the profile over the actual person that is making it, with the initial impression of photos being a large part of what decides who get "engagement" and who does not. Many users get sucked into a mindless dopamine hijack loop where they swipe left and right without any sort of conscious engagement into what they are doing. And the platforms don't mind if that means you spend more time on those platforms. When you do this you are directly contributing the the rise of this shallow dynamic.

When people are conditioned by the design of these platforms to act in a certain way they can change their behaviors significantly. And the very design of the swipe based sites pushes people to be more shallow. One way that behaviors tend to change is that people are spending less and less time processing images and text. For example there are studies that show the way people read on screens is now considerably different to how they read on printed paper. Further than this on dating apps many users don't even read the profiles at all, some just swipe on the initial image and some just skip the text entirely. Another way these swipe based sites are changing behaviors is that influence the users calibration of the number of options that they have available to them. When you are shown a steady stream of good looking photos it becomes very easy to be subconsciously influenced into rejecting perfectly good dating options.

This all leads to a situation where if your photos are not good relative to the other photos on the app you are ignored. Even if you have everything else going for you a bad photo will completely torpedo your chances of success on any modern online dating platform that uses the swipe-left/swipe-right mechanism. This is a very bitter pill for many people to swallow because there are a lot of people out there that would be exceptional in relationships and have a lot to offer. If you are of good character and have worked exceptionally hard to generate value you bring to a relationship I'm sure it's hard to accept that the photos are more important than all that work on these apps, but it is what it is. If you don't like that then its best to seek out relationships in settings where your positives can more easily be seen.

Even if you try to resist putting all your focus on the photos you'll very quickly find that success is entirely dependent on the photos more than anything else on all dating platforms that use the swipe mechanic for matches. This has naturally led to many commentators suggesting various things that people can do to make their photos "better" for the online dating sites which has most definitely created an arms race.

If you had worked with photography and photo editing apps like Photoshop, you would have known that there were ways to alter images to make them look more appealing. This process originally required expertise in that software and images that had been "photoshopped" were limited by the number of people who had those software skills. The launch of Instagram in 2010 changed the landscape dramatically. Before the launch, Cole Rise, a professional photographer, suggested to the Instagram team that they incorporate photo filters directly in the app. This greatly reduced the barrier to entry for people applying filters to their photos. The ability to apply filters at the click of a button was part of what made Instagram a wild success. One of the great ironies about this is that Rise, the creator of the original Instagram filters and the Instagram logo, made no money out of the $1.2 billion Instagram acquisition by facebook. In case you didn't know it already, Instagram and Facebook are owned by the same parent company Meta. The other irony is that Rise suggests that people should only use filters sparingly and only when they add value, "In order to see a filter you have to be heavy-handed, but if you can remove it and get to the higher truth of what the image is trying to say, I think that’s better".

The most obvious first step in this arms race for online attention was the application of "filters" to profile images. This is the act of taking a photo then running it through various image processing algorithms that change the photos in ways that make them look "better". At least at first this led to more "impressions" and "attention" on apps so a lot of people started doing this. After filters became very common there was a movement in the opposite direction when people started to notice that there was a negative correlation between heavy filters and people who actually looked great without them. This then led to a number of other filters that were more subtle. This arms race has continued over multiple iterations now.

However AI powered services offer far more that just altering an image, they can create photo-realistic images that are entirely fictitious. Take a look at this advertisement I saw today:

It is worth taking a moment to really engage your imagination, what things could you use a service like this for?

AI powered catfishing is becoming the new norm

There's a number of services now that will "generate" good looking photos of you. These aren't real photos but are rather fabrications being passed off as real photos. The whole point of this is deception to up "engagement" on online platforms. This sort of deception is getting more and more popular by the day because, at least for now, engaging in this will bump up people's engagement numbers which leads to them getting their dopamine addictions fueled. If you only ever interact with someone's carefully curated online persona and never with them directly you might never see how much their online persona differs from their real self.

There's the powerful combination of both dishonesty and vested financial interests coming together with these new technologies. The effects of their use will wreak havoc on the status quo. The start of this process is happening now, as we see these image altering services starting to advertise aggressively on social media platforms. The status quo will change and will change quickly when people realize what this technology enables.

For example, maybe you have facial asymmetry, now you can subtly change your photos to look a little bit better while still looking mostly like you. If people don't consciously pick up on it this deception is likely to be successful at deceiving. Even if not everyone does it the honest people will be left behind.

What people jokingly refer to as "hatfishing", the act of hiding baldness by only having photos on a profile wearing a hat, might go away in favor of just having AI image generation just adding hair that doesn't exist. Even if not everyone does it the honest people will be left behind.

What if you don't have a good fashion sense or wardrobe? There's now an app that will generate pictures with your face matched with clothes.

Another example, say you are running a bunch of fake accounts to promote shady products on dating sites (unfortunately a common situation). You could use one of these AI services to fake your way through account verification. Now you can have entirely fake accounts that, at least for now, could get that blue verified checkmark before they get banned.

As soon as the common knowledge shifts behaviors will shift very fast. The honest people who don't manipulate their online personas will start to be disadvantaged compared to those who do. For people seeking relationships the honest people with integrity are far more desirable for long term relationships. People will get increasingly frustrated that the people they meet on dates don't actually match their online personas. But in an online dating atmosphere where people make judgement in under a second based on a single image, the dishonest people who know about these image services will be at a significant, and growing, advantage. When people start to realize that nothing on these apps is trustworthy there will be a mass exodus of users who are looking to match up with people who have integrity. This might come about because the fraudulent users grow in numbers or because the honest users who are getting left behind in the arms race get frustrated and leave. In any case the demographics will shift and the behaviors of the remaining pool of users will not be the same. It might take a while for people to get repetitively burned but eventually word will start to go around that the value of these sites has diminished significantly because the images on them cannot be trusted. Then when people start leaving network effects start to become very powerful, but this time in reverse. Instead of more people joining a platform because there's more people on it, people will start to leave because more people are leaving. Much like how Myspace was the big thing and at the time seemed like it was going to be there for the long haul, fickle users will leave platforms for the next thing if presented with a better option.

Eventually I anticipate this will inevitably lead to a renaissance for in-person dating. There are many things that can't be duplicated online, and as AI makes online deception cheaper and easier than ever before people might start to really reconsider the value of meeting people face to face.