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Could the strange final photos on dating apps like Tinder be a symbol of our already declining confidence in pre-screened dating?
If you’ve been on dating apps recently, you might have noticed something strange. And no, I don’t just mean the obscure but seemingly popular fish holding photos and outrageous Hinge voice notes aside – although let’s not normalise this type of behaviour.
What I’m talking about is the strange photo which sits, hidden until inevitably found, at the end of users’ profiles. Click, click, click and then, suddenly: is that a 19th century painting? Or a billboard of a famous Chinese actor? Or even, a bobble head?
Although this weird occurrence seems not to have made it into the limelight, it’s been notable enough to lead to plenty of exasperated dating app users in online comments, and for content creator and researcher Christophe Haubursin to make a YouTube video about it.
And well, if it’s good enough for the people, it’s good enough for me. So let’s dive in.
At first, it was speculated that perhaps this was a kind of sex-codification. This wouldn’t be completely out of pocket as a theory. In queer culture there are after all a multitude of terms, and accompanying emojis, for the different categories of gay man. These range from bear to otter, to cub, to pup, to wolf, and on and on and on.
This explanation, although perhaps a little far fetched, would at least partially explain why the photo used, the anomaly in the profile, was so often the same one.
Except the presence, or indeed the ubiquity, of the photo wasn’t the strangest thing about it. What was, is that each third-party photo was slightly modified with someone else’s face. This face definitely wasn’t a part of the original image, but neither was it the face of the person in the profile.
This led to a suggestion that these photos were the result of some kind of AI glitch. All of the profiles were of conventionally attractive, European looking men. All the photos were the same, until the last one. Could this mean that Tinder AI was producing these stereotypically ‘hot’ profiles in order to maintain engagement?
At a time when dating app fanaticism is waning in place of face-to-face dating events, and a desire for connection supersedes that of swift-swipe verification, it would make sense that Tinder would need to do something to draw in and engage users with the apps.
That said, it may be unfair to assume Tinder’s AI is so unreliable that it frequently causes noticeable glitches across many profiles.
Using reverse image recognition technology, Haubursin managed to find the real people behind the profile photos. While the men in the photos weren’t the people that the profiles said they were, they were real men.
Their photos were being impersonated by other users in order to gain more likes. This, coupled with the suggestion of moving the conversation over to WhatsApp when you interact with the profiles, and then steering the conversation towards crypto currency, positively screamed romance scam.
