🤖What is Chatfishing?

Where the word came from

It is a new word, built on catfishing: that one fakes the face, this one fakes the voice. It arrived as chatbots became good enough to write a warm, funny paragraph in two seconds. Almost nobody starts out planning to deceive anyone. You are staring at an empty message box at one in the morning, terrified of being boring, and there is a tool right there that is never boring.

There is a real spectrum here, and pretending otherwise is not useful. Running a message through a model to fix your spelling, or to take the sting out of something you wrote while angry, is not the same as pasting in what they said and sending back whatever comes out. A simple test settles most of it: would they recognise you when you meet?

How to tell you are talking to a model

• Every reply is fluent, warm and slightly generic — lovely sentences that would suit almost anyone.
• It responds to everything you said and asks nothing real back; the follow-ups stay polite and surface-level.
• The tone never moves. Same length, same polish at nine in the morning and at two at night, never a typo, never a one-word reply.
• Specifics evaporate. Something you mentioned two days ago comes back paraphrased, or does not come back at all.

How to check without accusing anyone

If you suspect it, do not open with an accusation — you may be wrong, and it is a horrible thing to be wrong about. Move the conversation somewhere a model handles badly instead. Send a voice note. Send a photo of what is in front of you. Ask something that only makes sense if they remember what you said on Tuesday. Or just suggest meeting sooner. Real people are much easier to find in person.

If you are the one doing it, the bill comes on the first date. Three weeks of being wittier than you are, and then you have to sit at a table as yourself. The drop gets felt even when nobody can name it. Nobody was ever left over a clumsy message — people leave over the gap between the message and the person.

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