Writing

Do you have to tell them your photos are AI?

6 August 2026

There is no rule that says you have to. There is also a version of this that is obviously fine and a version that is obviously not, and the useful work is in saying where the line sits rather than pretending there is no line at all.

Nobody can tell you that you must

You will find pages insisting that disclosure is required and pages insisting it never comes up. Both are overreaching. This is not a legal question we are qualified to answer, and we are not going to claim that any particular app obliges you to declare how an image was made, or that any app forbids you from using one. Platform rules on AI content differ by app and change, and the only current version is the one on that app's own terms page. If you need that answer, read it there.

What is left is a question about the person, not the platform. That one is answerable.

The version that is obviously fine

You are 34, you look 34 in the picture, it is your face and your body, and the image exists because getting decent photographs of yourself is genuinely hard. Most people's camera rolls are a wall of group photos, two acceptable pictures from a wedding in 2022, and nothing else. Asking a friend for an hour of their Saturday is a favour, and it comes with the specific awkwardness of being looked at, which is why most people never ask a second time.

Nobody discloses that a friend took their photo. Nobody discloses that they used the portrait setting on their phone. Nobody discloses that the picture on their profile is the best of forty attempts, and it is always the best of forty attempts. Every profile is curated by definition, everybody knows it, and that is why none of it needs saying.

Generation used to produce an accurate, current image of you sits in the same category. What it changes is the effort, not the truth of the result.

The version that is obviously not fine

A different jawline. A different body. Ten years off. Hair that is no longer there. A face narrowed until the person in the picture is a version of you that has never existed.

That is not a photo of you, and it does not matter in the slightest what made it. The same objection lands on a heavily processed real photograph, on a picture from before your body changed, and on a picture of somebody else entirely. The problem is the gap, and disclosure does not close it. Saying "by the way, that image was generated" while sitting opposite somebody who can already see a different face does not help. It only names the thing they had noticed.

The test for everything in between

Most real situations are not at either end, so here is a test that works on the middle.

Could you show them how it was made, at the point where they already like you, without it changing anything?

Picture the third date. It is going well. You explain in one sentence where the picture came from. Now ask yourself honestly what happens next. If they shrug and the conversation moves on, you are fine, and you were fine the entire time. If something shifts, then the image was doing work the rest of you cannot support, and you knew that before you ran the test.

The test works because it strips out the two things that distort the question. It removes the fear of being rejected by a stranger, since this person already likes you. And it removes the abstraction, since you have to imagine one specific face reacting rather than a hypothetical public.

If it comes up, it is one sentence

Sometimes it does come up. Somebody asks where a photo was taken, or says one picture looks different from the others, or just asks outright. The answer is short, and the delivery matters more than the wording.

"I generated a couple of them, my camera roll is all group photos" is a complete answer. So is "yeah, a tool made that one, it is what I actually look like though". What ruins it is never the content. It is the defensiveness: a paragraph of justification, a pre-emptive argument about how everyone uses filters anyway, a hurried change of subject. Somebody who likes you does not care much how the file was produced. They care whether you are who you appeared to be, and the length of your answer is evidence about exactly that.

The timing asymmetry, which is real and is not about ethics

Say it early and it reads as candour. Say the identical sentence after somebody has worked it out and asked you directly, and it reads as a confession. Nothing about the underlying fact has changed. Only the order has.

This is worth knowing because it is the mechanism behind most bad outcomes here. People are rarely upset that a photo was generated. They are upset that they had to be the one to raise it, because that implies you were waiting to see whether you would get away with it. The information is identical, the inference is not, and the inference is the whole event.

None of which means you should announce it in your bio. It means that if you are carrying this around as a thing to be careful about, you have already answered the earlier question, and the answer was that the photo is wrong.

The word catfishing is doing damage here

Catfishing means pretending to be a different person. It describes intent and identity, not software. Applying it to anybody whose photos were generated collapses two very different things: somebody whose accurate picture came out of a model, and somebody who is not the person they claim to be at all. The first is a choice about presentation. The second is a lie about who is on the other end of the conversation.

The collapsed version of the word makes people anxious about the wrong thing. It sends them hunting for a method they can defend, when what they need is a photo they can stand behind. Those two searches lead to opposite decisions.

What this is actually about

Every profile is edited. You picked six pictures out of a thousand, you wrote three sentences out of an entire personality, and you left out the parts you suspected would not land. Nobody calls that dishonest, because the person who turns up is still the person in the profile.

The line has never been about method. It is about whether the profile makes a promise that the person keeps. Generated photos can keep that promise easily and break it easily, exactly like every other kind of photo.

If you are unsure which side of the line you are on, the more useful page is the one about what your date actually notices, which works through what has to be true of the image itself before any of this comes up.

Written by Fottory, which generates dating photos from photos of your own face. The first two are free, and none of the advice above depends on using it.