Using AI to write your dating app messages is no longer a surprise. More than 1 in 4 singles in the US have already used AI to help with their dating life, a figure that jumped 333% in a single year.

Dating apps are actively encouraging it, too. Hinge is pushing AI features into its app, Bumble has its own Bee AI assistant, and Facebook Dating now has an AI chatbot to help you find love. However, a new peer-reviewed study from Constructor University suggests that it might not be the romantic shortcut everyone hoped for.

What the Cyrano Effect reveals about AI-assisted romance

Named after the French play about a man who writes love letters on behalf of someone else, the Cyrano Effect describes what happens when AI becomes the real author of your romantic communication.

Researcher Dr. Lennart Ante interviewed 45 dating app users, split between people who used AI to write their messages and people who received them. AI users rarely saw themselves as cheaters. Many framed ChatGPT as social anxiety medication in text form, a phrase one participant actually used. Others treated online dating as a numbers game to optimize before the real connection happens in person.

Meanwhile, the people on the receiving end of these messages had a very different experience. Words like betrayed, violated, and catfished came up repeatedly. Several became so suspicious of well-written messages that one described every conversation as an exhausting Turing test.

The moment AI-assisted charm meets real life and falls completely flat

One participant described spending the day before a date rereading the AI chat, trying to memorize how to act, calling it “cramming for an exam, but the subject is this fake version of yourself.” Dr. Ante calls this the Persona-to-Person Leap, the anxiety-ridden moment when an AI-polished online persona has to show up in real life without any algorithmic backup.

Recipients described meeting someone who seemed charming online but turned up quiet and awkward in person. The AI had set a bar that the real person could not clear.

The study does not call for outright bans on AI dating tools, noting they can help people with social anxiety or language barriers. But it argues that when the words that spark a connection are not yours, the connection tends not to survive beyond the first coffee.