Tinder Is Using AI to Quietly ‘Fix’ Your Photos

I woke up this morning to discover a photo on my Tinder profile that, for lack of better words, wasn’t me. While I recognised the image, my skin now had a waxy glow, and one of my eyelids had an uncanny swell, like I had been in a fight with ChatGPT and lost. 

Had I, in some crazed night-time fever, used AI to create deepfakes of myself… for Tinder? I had no recollection of ever using AI to “fix up” my thirst traps. Stranger was the fact that, even inebriated, I never would’ve posted anything online that was so clearly… fake. Indeed, if I saw anything like it on someone else’s profile, I’d assume they were a catfish and immediately swipe left.

When I investigated, I saw that beneath the photo in question, there was an “✓ Enhanced” button.

The button was toggled on. I immediately turned it off and searched my profile for other signs of this new intruder. Thankfully, the rest of my photos had been spared.

Tinder’s New “Enhanced Photo” Feature

As it turns out, the new “Enhance Photo” feature was actually announced in Tinder’s product keynote in March this year. It was framed as a means of improving lighting and image clarity, a way for Tinder users to “put [their] most authentic self forward”. So, naturally, we ignored it.

What the presentation failed to mention was that the feature would make otherwise candid photos look like cheap deepfakes, be applied to select photos automatically, and that, as a consequence, many users like myself would go on to parade around AI glow-ups of themselves without even knowing.

Of course, there’s another reason the deceptive “Enhance Photo” feature slipped our attention. Namely, it was one of several new features announced at the time, among them a far more imposing beast. The “Camera Roll Scan” promised to “help surface authentic moments hidden in your old photos”. In other words, Tinder wanted unfettered access to our private digital albums.

It didn’t matter that the “Camera Roll Scan” was an opt-in feature. Proponents of privacy and critics of AI were quick to catastrophise dating apps having this kind of power. But amid the controversy, it seems the “Enhance Photo” feature slipped by our picketlines without so much as a “hello”. 

Now that Match Group, the parent company of both Tinder and Hinge, has entered into a $100 million partnership with Sniffies, fears are mounting. It seems even queer apps lauded for their “authentic edge” could soon join the empire of AI dating (and datamining).