A woman's Reddit post on r/isthisAI has sparked a debate about authenticity in modern dating and whether expecting it is reasonable. She had suspected that a man who was talking to her on the dating app Hinge was using some kind of AI agent to respond to her texts flirtily, depending on the responses that the AI thinks are best suited to the situation.
The poster, however, realized that the man sounded far too polished to be genuine, especially after she told him she wanted to live life like a '90s romcom movie. His response was a bit too robotic as it read: "That honestly tracks. You definitely give off 'makes a playlist for every life moment' energy." After reading this message, she realized that doing her own experiment with ChatGPT (after feeding it her response) would be a better proof than asking him directly. So when she did the same, ChatGPT responded: "I knew it. You have 'main character walking through the grocery store while a soft indie soundtrack plays' energy."
But when she called him out on his AI usage for such a simple task, he was "offended" that she even implied it. "But it just sounds so unnatural," she said.
In the comments section of this post, several commenters noted that "that honestly tracks" sounded like a typical AI response. Another person said that language of this sort ("now I'm judging the whole cinematic universe") is more like that of a large language model (LLM), which has been trained on how culture and media writing usually work and not how one would approach a regular conversation.
"I'm an editor, and I've worked at pop culture sites where the writers talk at length about cinematic universes," a Reddit user wrote. "These same articles were swallowed up by the LLM, and that's why AI sounds like a 30-something content writer trying to put their journalism degree to use." In the same thread, the poster wrote that she had mentioned loving the 1998 film You've Got Mail. According to a screenshot included in the post, she wrote: "AI hadn't been invented yet, so they composed emails with their own words to connect like real humans."
One of the commenters related to the incident and said: "I've received AI messages too, and when I called it out, the sentence structure immediately changed, and that's how I knew he was lying." In reply to this, the original poster also confirmed that this man's next message started with the short form of a profanity in the very next message, which was a notable shift from the polished tone he had used throughout their conversation.
People are using tools like ChatGPT to message dating app matches. What happens when they meet in-person? https://t.co/2K7PJODwc2
— Mashable (@mashable) March 20, 2025
Meanwhile, another Redditor said that their father had been using ChatGPT to respond to dating app messages himself. The user added: "I told him it sounds like he didn't have time for dating if he doesn't have time to actually get to know people." Another person in the comments section said that a woman he had been talking to for a month was also using AI similarly. Except that after meeting her, "[He] liked her in text way better than [he] did in person."
The poster did not share a follow-up on whether she continued talking to the man.
