Women use AI to detect men telling tall stories about their height

Have you ever met a date who turned out to be shorter than his online profile claimed? It’s a common frustration for many daters, but now some women are using technology to call out the height exaggerators.Justine Moore, a venture capitalist from San Francisco, went viral with her tweet this week when she discovered that ChatGPT can accurately estimate a date’s height from their photo.She posted on Twitter/X: “The girls are using ChatGPT to see if men are lying about their height on dating apps. Upload 4 pictures, it uses proportions and surroundings to estimate height. I tested it on 10 friends & family members — all estimates were within 1 inch of their real height.”
Men often try to join the “six foot club” by rounding up their height online and others use angle fraud or other tricks to exaggerate.A video titled “How to look taller in two easy steps (Tinder Hack)” from the YouTube channel WingMan Plus suggests standing on a crate and then posing next to a car to boost relative height. It adds that you should always shoot your picture from below to make the most of your inches.Analysis by the dating site OKCupid shows that men like to add a couple of inches to their height.The reasons are no surprise: various studies have shown that taller men tend to get more responses on apps, which is linked to perceived greater masculinity, competence, and intelligence. The dating apps know this and have paid features that allow users to filter their dates by height.The female march towards a generic, unattainable beau was the subject of a viral TikTok video that ended up being one of the sounds of this summer.
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The creator Megan Boni posted a 17-second clip on the platform saying: “I’m looking for a man in finance, trust fund, six foot five, blue eyes.” It struck a chord and ended up being clipped, looped, put to music and played in clubs in the US and UK. “I was trying to make fun of single girls who complain about being single but then have all these needs that are impossible,” Boni explained in an interview.Zaahirah Adam, founder of the new dating app hati, said: “If you ask most women, for some apparent reason since dating apps … ‘taller than six foot’ has become a desirable character trait. Whereas when you met people in a bar … I think most women like a man that is taller than them, but not necessarily like six foot.”Adam’s app is trying to create a genuine connection between dates by insisting on phone calls rather than texting and then progressing to a video call and/or face-to-face meeting. They also insist on verification — although not for height.“We ask that their friends verify the information they’ve put in: their age, name, that they’re single and they do the job they say they do. It’s become so prevalent that people just lie about everything,” Adam said.
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It’s not just men telling lies or exaggerating. Women’s hit rate on dating apps starts to drop off when they reach their late twenties and early thirties, so they are entering younger ages. They are also ardent users of photo editing software.Adam says: “Women ‘photoshop’ their photos to the moon and back. You have photo editing software where it will shrink the entire size of your body and your face and you can distort your nose and all sorts of weird and wonderful things.“I’ve been on so many dates where men are like, thank god you’ve looked like what you do on your profile.”