They’ve reimagined celebrities as Disney princesses, predicted what our last selfies on Earth would look like, and even fostered a brand new copyright nightmare in the fanart industry. Synonymous with shitposting on Twitter and Discord, AI image generators have long been flooding our feeds—hailed as the future of ‘creative’ content. With the technology recording new features and tools despite its ethical debate, it’s safe to say that generative AI is still in its infant era in 2022.

While Midjourney recently rolled out a remix feature that lets users merge two completely different images—in turn, unleashing a wave of memes that require some serious eye-bleach—a new online service has been gripping dating app users, especially those who are looking to kittenfish the heck out of their matches on Tinder.

Created by Sebastien Lhomme, PhotoAI essentially requires you to upload ten mediocre selfies in order to generate a bunch of fake photos in different art styles of your choosing. Costing $19 per pack and $5 for additional bundles, you can pick your poison between generating pop art images, creating polaroids, and editing yourself into your favourite movies and memes. Photoshop pranksters could never.

Heck, the website also sports a pack that will plaster your face next to iconic images of public figures. Are you one of those Elon Musk fanbois currently stationed outside Twitter HQ hoping to get a selfie with the problematic Technoking? PhotoAI will get the job done, sans the physical interaction.

Although the sample images provided under each pack on PhotoAI’s website—generated using Lhomme’s selfies—are impressive, to say the least, two bundles in particular stand out among the options. Titled ‘LinkedIn pack’ and ‘Tinder pack’, the bundles claim to generate 30 fake photos of yourself for the platforms in question.

While the former package will conjure images of you in a suit and other business attire with the goal of “saving time and money” instead of going to a “real photo studio,” the latter promises to make you “the best you’ve ever looked.” After a quick scroll through the sample images under the Tinder pack, it seems that the best you’ll ever look is like a crypto bro staring into the abyss with shades on.

After purchasing the pack of your choice and uploading your selfies, the site claims to return results in 12 hours. “You’re only allowed to upload photos of YOURSELF that YOU own the rights to,” the site’s privacy policy reads. “You’re not allowed to upload photos of other people. And photos that you do not own the rights to. You’re not allowed [to] upload naked or pornographic photos. We’re not liable for any results that might hurt you in any way.”

Although there are no legal guidelines governing the ethical use of AI generators, it’s worth noting that DALL·E mini has previously spewed some awfully racist images from text prompts.

“To ensure your privacy and safety, ALL photos you upload are PERMANENTLY deleted within seven days after generating,” the site goes on to add. “The [AI] model trained on your photos is also PERMANENTLY deleted after seven days.” Phew?

According to Lhomme, PhotoAI works by generating a “fine tune” AI model from the selfies uploaded by users. These results are then filtered through a second model that renders the chosen style before they are fed into Stable Diffusion, an open-source text-to-image generator.

“In other words, you’re not paying for fancy proprietary AI technology, but for a service that simply feeds your photos into a pre-existing AI image generator,” Vice’s Motherboard noted in this regard. “Similar services have cropped up in recent months that, for a fee, will use AI to generate text prompts… which can then, of course, be used to generate photos with AI.”

But the real dilemma arises when such images make their way onto dating apps. While Tinder swiped left on catfishing by deploying AI for profile verifications in 2020, it’s unclear if AI-generated selfies violate the app’s terms of service. At the moment, however, there’s nothing preventing users from uploading fake images of themselves designed by an algorithm at the helm. While dating apps like Bumble seek to revolutionise user experiences by making its nude-detecting AI public to combat cyberflashing on the broader internet, the possibilities of OpenAI seem to be a step back to where we started in terms of impersonation and misrepresentation.

When Motherboard reached out to Lhomme, the creator claimed that he won’t be held responsible for how people use the photos his service generates. He pointed out that, even without the help of AI, humanity has long been leveraging Photoshop or hiring freelancers to morph their pictures.

“The tech is so new, the use cases it will solve over the next few months or years are inevitably going to lead to interesting questions about legality and morality,” Lhomme said. “Things will be blurry for a while, and I think collaboration will need to happen between all the parties involved to decide what are the best rules and responsibilities for everyone to ensure the ethical usage of such technologies.”

Despite this ethical debate, Lhomme suggested that AI-generated images will eventually become ubiquitous. He went on to note that selfies are already digitally manipulated by filters on smartphone cameras, and people are not any wiser.

“Of course, the tech isn’t quite there yet, but it will be soon,” he concluded. “And once the AI-generated photos are indistinguishable from ‘real’ photos, the question of whether they are real or not will become irrelevant.” Maybe the internet should stick to using the AI that roasts people based on their selfies for a tad longer.

Does benching, breadcrumbing, breezing, cushioning, negging, hogging and pocketing ring a bell? What about catfishing? Introduced to the dating world in the 2010 documentary film called Catfish, the term refers to the deceptive practice where someone pretends to be a completely different person online than they are in real life. A catfish will typically steal another individual’s identity (including their pictures, date of birth and geographical location), avoid showing their face on video calls and make up stories that are often too good to be true.

In Catfish, photographer Nev Schulman documented his own journey to uncover who was really behind the long-distance relationship he’d been having with 19-year-old singer named ‘Megan’. Eventually, he finds out that the person on the other end—who he’d engaged with over hundreds of text messages, Facebook posts and phone calls—had been a middle-aged man based in Michigan.

Although Schulman went on to create the MTV series Catfish: The TV Show, we’re here to acknowledge a growing offspring of catfishing today—which, to be honest, we’re all lowkey guilty of to a certain extent. Welcome to the wildly exaggerated world of kittenfishing. Now, before you ask, no, this toxic dating trend has nothing to do with furry little munchkins dunking their paws in water or staring rather greedily at a fish tank.

Coined by the dating app Hinge in 2017, kittenfishing is the diet version of catfishing if you will, a tactic where you purposely misrepresent yourself online but not to the extreme extent where you have a full-fledged false identity complete with a fake passport and accent. Think about deploying tiny white lies—like exaggerating your height, age and interest or even adding a country or two to those you’ve actually seen—all in the hopes to hook a potential date.

https://www.tiktok.com/@kittypuffrug/video/7034524723098815750

A kittenfisher is an expert at enhancing their dating profile. Be it with tiny tweaks (like embellishing their job title and lifestyle to sound more impressive), or full-blown clickbait antics (for instance, using old and heavily edited pictures of themselves to match the adjusted age description), a kittenfisher would bend the truth about anything to round favours from their matches. Heck, examples of the dating trend on the internet also include bald men—apologies, males with receding hairlines up till the nape of their necks—wearing hats in all their snaps.

Essentially, kittenfishing refers to a well-intended phenomenon: painting yourself in a more positive light. What harm could it possibly do, right? According to a study by Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project, more than half of online daters (54 per cent) admit that their matches have “seriously misinterpreted” themselves in their dating profiles. When Hinge surveyed its users they found that 38 per cent of men and 24 per cent of women reported being kittenfished on the platform. What’s more interesting is that only two per cent of men and one per cent of women admitted kittenfishing someone else. Simply put, the toxic dating strategy is so elusive that people are not even realising they’re doing it.

Research has additionally proved that men typically exaggerate their height while women are more prone to mess with details about their weight. Statistics collected by the dating app OkCupid further noted that the more attractive a photo, the more likely it is out of date.

Although kittenfishing is a lighter version of catfishing, the dating tactic can have serious consequences on a relationship. Sure, knocking a year or two off your age doesn’t seem like a big deal when you haven’t even set up a lunch date with your match yet, however,  the further the in-person meetup goes, the more likely it will be that you’ve based the entire relationship on a lie. And we all know how that usually ends.

“The most important element for a successful, long-lasting relationship is trust, so when you lie in your profile, you’re only setting your date up for disappointment when their expectations don’t match reality,” Damona Hoffman, dating coach and host of the Dates & Mates podcast, told HuffPost. “You might be able to make it through a few first dates with secrets, but if your relationship evolves, eventually you will have to come clean. That could mean the end of an otherwise great partnership,” the expert continued. “It’s a missed opportunity to find someone who will love you as you are.”

By this point I’m pretty sure most of you are either recalling your experiences of being kittenfished or realising you might be guilty of the crime yourself—which has become commonplace in the dating world today. Either way, here are a few pointers to help spot kittenfishing before it gets out of hand, as recommended by psychologist Ana Jovanovic in an interview with NBC News.

If you pay close attention to the conversations with your potential match, you may notice contradictory details in their stories or “see them fail to respond to a relatively simple question about a topic they seem to be very passionate about.”

Next up is the absence of details surrounding the element of a person’s life that they’ve lied to you about. If, for example, someone has embellished their job title in their dating profile, they may avoid going into specifics about what their position entails as there may be a high chance they accidentally reveal the truth in the process of explaining it.

Lastly, according to Jovanovic, if it seems like your match has no flaws whatsoever, there’s a high chance they’re probably too good to be true. At this stage, it’s up to you to decide if you want to investigate further. But Jovanovic ultimately advises to ask yourself: What is the person trying to cover or lie about, how severe is the kittenfishing and how important is this to you? “You will need to make your decision on what to do based on the answer to this question,” the expert added.

Be it with an edited selfie or adding a few inches to your height, if you think you’ve kittenfished someone else, it’s time to address the speculations—once and for all. On these terms, Jovanovic recommends asking yourself the following questions and answering them honestly:

This is one of the most basic exercises you can do to analyse if you’ve been kittenfishing your matches. Imagine yourself showing up for a date with someone you’ve met online. Would they recognise you easily from your photos? Sure, we all have good angles, but are you intentionally tweaking the way you look on the internet a tad too far?

In an interview with Bustle, Chris Armstrong, relationship coach and founder of Maze of Love, explained how kittenfishing has become a common practice today—given how dating is a competitive sport and we all feel the pinch. “So we resort to embellishment,” Armstrong said. “We do what we need to gain an edge. Second to this, we believe it is harmless and that our charm and wit will win out in the end.” But the ugly truth is that even if you chant “I know I’m not really six feet but she’ll love my sense of humour,” you might just land a first date but blow all your chances of subsequent ones. 

Disclaimer: the answer to this question may be a shocker if you believe you’ve engaged with the dating strategy in question.

A good beginners exercise is to get feedback on your dating profile from your close friends. Cringy, I know. But the insights you’d receive are bound to be the most honest ones—which will help you put your best foot forward and analyse if you’ve been misleading your matches all along.

Now, if you really think about it, kittenfishing has been a thing long before dating apps were even birthed into existence. Your parents might have won each other over with slight tweaks about their GPA and life goals. Heck, over here in India, families have been downright lying about their healthy dynamics to land matrimonial matches for centuries.

Though we won’t be able to eradicate kittenfishing altogether from the dating sphere anytime soon, it’s time to at least be self-aware of the toxic practice—and the earlier, the better.