Dean says this can make an already uncomfortable situation more stressful. “If you go into an app you think is a dating app and you don’t see any living people or any profiles, then you might wonder, ‘Why am I here? What are you doing with my attention while I’m in your app? Are you wasting it? Are you driving me toward ads that I don’t care about? Are you driving me toward fake profiles?'”

Not all bots have malicious intent, and in fact many are created by the companies themselves to provide useful services. (Imperva refers to these as “good bots.”) Lauren Kunze, CEO of Pandorabots, a chatbot development and hosting platform, says she’s seen dating app companies use her service. “So we’ve seen a number of dating app companies build bots on our platform for a variety of different use cases, including user onboarding, engaging users when there aren’t potential matches there. And we’re also aware of that happening in the industry at large with bots not built on our platform.”