Beginner · Research

Chatfishing

Visual diagram · (in preparation) · Math · (in preparation) · Worked example · 3 difficulty levels.

TL;DR. Presenting an AI's conversational output as your own words in chat — catfishing, but with a chatbot writing your lines.

Technical Definition

Presenting an AI's conversational output as your own words in chat — catfishing, but with a chatbot writing your lines.

How it works

Chatfishing is the dating-app-and-DM equivalent of the meat proxy: using a model to compose your messages — the charm, the wit, the perfectly timed empathy — and passing them off as your own voice. The term surfaced in the October 2026 slang roundups as a natural extension of catfishing, and it captures a genuine trust injury: the other person built a model of who you are from prose you didn't produce. It matters beyond romance because chat is now a load-bearing medium — support, hiring, friendship — and a growing share of it is machine-drafted on one side. The counter-norm that formed quickly: assistance is fine, disclosure is situational, but if the persona is the product, the persona should be real.

Related Concepts

• Meat Proxy — A person who forwards AI-generated text, code or output without reading, understanding or validating it.
• AI Slap — Forwarding AI-generated text without reading it — the sending action of a meat proxy.
• Generative AI — An AI field focused on creating models that can generate novel and complex content, such as text, images, audio, and video, that is coherent and original.
• Deepfake — Synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness.