📋 Tender Overview
In the famous French play Cyrano de Bergerac, the brilliant but insecure Cyrano lends his eloquence to handsome, tongue-tied Christian to help him woo his lover. Today, a remarkably similar scene is playing out among millions of dating app users, with the role of the lovelorn poet played not by a human, but by AI. New research from Constructor University Professor Dr. Lennart Ante analyzes the growing impact of dating app users outsourcing the delicate work of courtship--from the witty opening line to the flirtatious reply--to AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, or even specialized wingman apps like Rizz and Winggg. Jun 15, 2026, 1:48:40 PM Adrian Chalifour , Constructor University Constructor University The Cyrano Effect: LLM-Assisted Impression Management and Authenticity in Online Dating, published this month in Telematics and Informatics, examines the implications of AIs growing incursion into the human dating pool. Recent surveys suggest more than one in four singles in the United States have already used AI to augment their dating life, while a majority of dating app users believe they have exchanged messages with an algorithm at some point. Drawing on 45 in-depth interviews with dating app users--including both those who use AI to write their messages and those who have received AI-assisted messages from a match--Prof. Antes study contributes vital understanding of a phenomenon that is rapidly reshaping how millions of people meet, court and connect online. I had been seeing more and more stories in the news and online about LLMs, lovebots and people forming romantic relationships with these AI tools, something I find utterly fascinating, said Prof. Ante on the inspiration behind the research project. While my own experience with dating apps is limited to occasionally seeing my friends swipe through Tinder, I couldnt help but wonder how AI might be creeping into these spaces as well. Over the past decade, online dating has become the definitive, mainstream pathway to romantic relationships. It is now the most common way that couples meet in the USA, and is underpinned by a 3.2 billion dating app industry boasting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Against this backdrop, generative AI is not a marginal curiosity, but a tool that is becoming increasingly embedded in one of the most intimate domains of everyday life. When the words that spark a first connection are no longer entirely ones own, it raises fundamental questions about what it means to be authentic, the nature of the human connections being formed, and the real-world implications when AI-augmented online personas eventually meet in-person and unassisted across a dinner table. To address these questions, Prof. Ante conducted semi-structured interviews with two distinct groups of dating app users: 23 individuals who reported using LLMs to help write profiles or messages, and 22 individuals who suspected or confirmed that a match had used AI in their communication. Participants were recruited from English-language online dating communities based primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and parts of Europe. The interviews were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, an interpretive approach designed to identify and understand the meanings that participants themselves attach to their experiences. What we see in the result is a nuanced, qualitative portrait of an emerging social practice that quantitative studies have so far only been able to gesture at, explained Prof. Ante. Existing surveys and experimental work convincingly show that disclosing AI involvement tends to reduce trust and attraction. While this establishes that a problem exists, it doesnt tell us why, or what people are actually feeling in these moments. A number on a trust scale doesnt capture a recipients experience of feeling violated or stupid for opening up emotionally, only to learn that they are interacting with AI responses. This is where the true value of this research lies. Prof. Antes study found three notable themes emerging from the data: 1. The Authenticity Paradox describes how users justify AI use not as deception, but a way to express their true selves more accurately, with AI acting as a sort of prosthesis for social anxiety, linguistic insecurity, or the perceived inefficiency of online dating. 2. The Digital Betrayal captures the experience of recipients who describe the moment they suspect or discover AI-use as a violation of trust, and a sense that something fundamental about the interaction has been faked. 3. The Persona-to-Person Leap traces the anxiety of moving from an AI-polished chat to an unassisted offline encounter--a transition that, in many cases, exposes a gap too wide to bridge. Together, these themes give rise to what Prof. Ante calls the Cyrano Effect: the entanglement of human and algorithmic authorship that reconfigures impression management, authenticity and trust in digitally mediated romance. My research focuses on actual lived experiences, where the real mechanism lives, explained Prof. Ante. By directly speaking with people, both those using the tools and those on the receiving end, I was able to assess the full arc, from the justification to the reveal, and finally, the awkward first date. What surprised me most was how coherent the justifications of AI users were, and at the same time how deeply betrayed the recipients felt, continued Prof. Ante. The same act--such as using ChatGPT to draft a flirtatious message--can be experienced from one side as the ability to finally express ones true self, and yet from the other side as a fundamental violation of trust. That asymmetry is what makes this phenomenon so difficult for users, platforms and the broader culture of online dating. Prof. Antes study contributes to research on computer-mediated communication by extending classical theories of impression management, authenticity, and trust into the age of generative AI. It introduces the notion o
