Dating apps are the easiest option to find your partner but are you truly dating a human or is it a chatbot?

Anything in this world can be used for good or evil purposes. Especially technologies like artificial intelligence, chatbots, etc.  These technologies were introduced to help you get the answer you need in the fastest possible way. The main purpose of the chatbot was to show empathy and consider that the conversation with a user feels as natural as possible. But there is always a loophole that hackers use to fool people.

Dating apps were launched to allow you to conveniently meet and connect with like-minded people, which can more than offset the potential costs in their use. But according to a report of the US Federal Trade Commission, in 2020, losses to romance scams reached a record US$304 million. A 50% increase from 2019, a direct result of the confinements and pandemic that forced people to move their relationships online. So the question is are you dating a chatbot? And how to detect if you are talking to a real person or a scam?

Tinder Chatbot

Dating Apps like Tinder have smoothed out the method involved with dating. You pick individuals you're keen on, and in case they're keen on you as well, you talk online for a bit. In case there's a flash, you get together, for real. However, as indicated by a new Mashable story, even that interaction ended up being excessively tedious for some programmers — which is the reason they're creating Tinder bots to do both the picking and the talking for them. So for the next time when you swipe right make sure the person is right.

Picture Perfect

To get you to swipe right, scammers use professional profile photographs, usually stolen either from other users or random models from Google searches. There are high chances that the person is a chatbot. If you feel something is off about a person's profile picture, you can perform a quick reverse image search on Google Images.

Immediate Responses

If you get your first message as soon as the profile matches with someone or they look to move the conversation to a different application, it might be a chatbot. Isn't it obvious that a person takes at least a couple of minutes to start a conversation or days in the case of a woman? If there's a match, it can go one of two ways, no reply at all, or a series of what seems scripted messages that scream chatbots alert.

Ways to outsmart your chatbot match:

Build creative conversation

Creating chatbots that can talk about almost anything is challenging. This is why for many years, the turning test was considered a key measure of artificial intelligence. Chatbots like Google's Meena, Microsoft's DialoGPT, or GPT-3 are promising, but hardly any hacker would spend that much money to fool people on dating apps.

Ask questions like, what would you name your boat if you had one? What's the closest thing to real magic? Who is the messiest person you know? What will finally break the internet? These questions might sound weird but you can easily figure out if a person is real or not.

Repetitive patterns

Chatbots usually reply using a similar answer pattern every time you ask a similar question. It is hard for any human to be that specific, even if they try. On repetitive questions humans either get frustrated or they say "You asked the question earlier". Bots will reply to your repetitive questions no matter how many times you ask them.

Ask about recent news or their thoughts on it

Do chatbots watch TV or read newspapers? No, they will not be aware of anything that has happened in the world since the last time they were trained. And only very advanced chatbots will come with some search functionality to go search online for recent news. But when you ask them about their thoughts on it, you will hardly get any answer. On the other hand, humans have different opinions and they can go on and on about anything.

Speak in your native language and video chat

If you know languages other than English, you're lucky. Most resources for training general chatbots are mostly in English or other very popular languages like Spanish, French, and more. As you know India is a powerhouse of languages. So if you speak other languages like Hindi, Marathi, Tamil, etc. use them to talk with the chatbot. As soon as you two get comfortable talking to each other make sure you have face time with one another before you truly fall in love with a chatbot.