AI is quietly becoming an unofficial and potentially unwanted 'third' in relationships

AI Chatbots See Growing Use for Emotional Support, With Mixed Views on Relationship Effects

Lindsey Hall, a writer based in Texas, suspected the man she was seeing was using AI. Uncertain about where things were going, she asked him outright what made him want to be with her. "You're fun, smart, pretty," she summed up his response. "The way it was written was so cold and so formal and so ChatGPT. I just remember being so turned off by that."

One night, about five months into dating, she happened upon a conversation he'd had with ChatGPT in which he expressed serious doubts about their relationship. "I'm just not proud of her," she said he'd written. He apologized after being confronted, and they dated for a few more months before breaking up. "I felt like I was in a relationship with me, him, and the robot," she said.

AI is taking on a new role in human relationships. A Pew Research Center survey published last month found that 12 percent of teens aged 13 to 17 reported using AI chatbots for emotional support or advice. A separate YouGov survey found that 13 percent of US adults, and 23 percent of those under 30, said they had shared a secret or problem with a chatbot that they had not told a human.

Chatbots can help people reflect, organize their thoughts, and prepare for difficult conversations, but experts in psychology, relationships, and AI told Business Insider that problems can arise when people start relying on AI instead of talking to their partners. Chatbots are also prone to excessive validation, which can make it harder for the person using them to empathize with their partner or see the other side of a situation.

Rachel Wood, a cyberpsychology researcher and founder of the AI Mental Health Collective, said while the impact of AI on jobs and the workplace is evident and widely discussed, she thinks the impact on human relationships could be even greater, and could take years to play out. "AI is shifting the relational bedrock of society," she said.

Confiding in a chatbot about your relationship can feel easier than talking to another person because there is no social risk, according to Ashleigh Golden, a licensed clinical psychologist who works on AI and mental health. It can also be validating, she said. Whereas a partner or friend might push back and encourage you to consider your own behavior, chatbots might not.

A study published in Science in March compared responses from 11 leading large language models with responses from humans and found the AI systems were nearly 50 percent more sycophantic, including when users described unethical, illegal, or harmful behavior. The authors found that a single interaction with a sycophantic AI made the study participants less willing to take responsibility or make amends with someone, and also increased their conviction of being right.

"You get the safety of disclosing to a stranger plus the felt sense of being deeply understood without any of the risk of being seen," Golden said.

Engaging with a chatbot also does not require many of the skills essential to maintaining human relationships, Wood said, such as patience, listening, negotiation, empathy, and compromise. "Those muscles will atrophy," she said, "which will in turn make us worse at our relationships because we're not practicing listening and holding space for each other."

Sharing with a chatbot instead of your partner might also feel like a betrayal to them, said Idit Sharoni, a licensed marriage and family therapist specializing in couples therapy and affair recovery. She said if you're confiding in AI about your relationship, your partner may feel like the chatbot has more access to your inner world than they do. "It totally can feel like emotional infidelity," she said.

A recent survey of 3,500 US users of the dating app Hily found that 70 percent of Gen Z respondents and 60 percent of millennials wouldn't date someone who relies on AI to make sense of their feelings. More than half said they would be uncomfortable with a partner discussing their shared sex life with AI.

Keven Cotton, a controller at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, said communication has not always been his strong suit during his six-year marriage, but that talking with AI has helped. After one disagreement with his wife, he said ChatGPT helped him consider how they may have misread each other and think through how to reopen the conversation.

He thinks talking about his relationship with AI has worked for him because therapy gave him a solid foundation for examining his own behavior rather than looking for validation. "You have to do the work to maximize what you're getting out of AI," he said. "If you're coming at it from a victim standpoint, it's going to give you victim responses."

Sharoni said chatbots could be useful when someone already knows what they want to discuss but needs help finding a way to bring it up. Issues can arise, she said, when using AI to interpret how the other person feels or make a judgement call based on one-sided facts.

If AI does help you work through your feelings, Wood recommends sharing that with your partner so it's not happening in secret. She suggested saying something like, "Hey, this is what the chatbot is reflecting back to me. What do you think about that?"

Couples may also want to establish their own rules for using AI, Golden said, including whether it's acceptable to vent about the relationship and whether concerns processed with a chatbot should eventually be brought back to the other person.

She said AI can be useful as a "pre-processing space," helping someone turn an initial messy feeling into something they can bring back to their partner, but that the risk is when AI stops being used as a "bridge" and becomes a "destination."

A chatbot can help you reflect or prepare, Cotton said, but it can't actually do the work of participating in a relationship. "AI can't show up for you," he said.

Do you have a story to share about how AI has affected your relationship? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com.