In the cutthroat world of online dating, men use AI to put their best face forward

Marissa, a 31-year-old Boston resident, downloaded dating apps because she is looking for love. But more and more, she finds herself looking for something else: AI-free photos.

"AI aside, I'm not sure what the appeal is there," she said (Marissa asked to withhold her surname for privacy reasons).

"People want authentic connections and conversations," Kathryn Coduto, an assistant professor at Boston University who studies dating apps, told CBS News in an email. "I think AI has made people more wary and skeptical of others, especially people they don't know."

"A dater has to think about how they're going to capture someone's attention in a few seconds or less," Coduto told CBS News. "This might mean making your photo look a little better than it might have before."

To be sure, this practice isn't exclusive to men. However, they appear more likely to use AI to spruce up their dating profiles than women, Coduto added.

Still, as technology improves, it's becoming harder to distinguish a real photo from one created by AI models.

Lana Li, a Brooklyn, New York, dating consultant who runs the Substack "Love Me Like a Robot," calls herself a "digital stylist." She uses AI to help men level up their dating app photos, and she defends using the technology as long as the photos still genuinely represent who they are.

The 37-year-old also uses FaceApp to change men's facial expressions. She said the edits are subtle, such as slightly lifting the corner of someone's mouth to make them look "friendlier."

"I told him, 'I can't work with you if you want to not represent yourself accurately,'" she said.

"It's very subtle," the man said, saying he still looked like himself, even with the edits. He emphasized that he doesn't want to "catfish" anyone — a concern for singles even in the absence of AI.

"This picture generally got the most likes," he told CBS News. "Now that could just be because it was the first thing they saw. But regardless, it was proving to be effective, and women seemed to like it."

"If you decide to include generative AI images, audio, or video in your profile, it should not be used to misrepresent yourself or your intentions," the company says on its AI policy page.