AI might not have taken your job yet—but it’s already writing your breakup text.
What began as a productivity tool has quietly become a social one, and people increasingly consult it for their most personal moments: drafting apologies, translating passive-aggressive texts, and, yes, deciding how to end relationships.
“I wholeheartedly believe that AI is shifting the relational bedrock of society,” says Rachel Wood, a cyberpsychology expert and founder of the AI Mental Health Collective. “People really are using it to run their social life: Instead of the conversations we used to have—with neighbors or at clubs or in our hobbies or our faith communities—those conversations are being rerouted into chatbots.”
As an entire generation grows up outsourcing social decisions to large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, Wood worries about the implications of turning the emotional work of connection over to a machine. What that means—for how people communicate, argue, date, and make sense of one another—is only beginning to come into focus.
When AI becomes your social copilot
It often starts as a second opinion. A quick paste of a text message into an AI chatbot. A question typed casually: “What do you think they meant by this?”
“People will use it to break down a blow-by-blow account of an argument they had with someone,” Wood says, or to decode ambiguous messages. “Maybe they’re just starting to date, and they put it in there and say, ‘My boyfriend just texted me this. What does it really mean?’” They might also ask: Does the LLM think the person they’re corresponding with is a narcissist? Does he seem checked out? Does she have a pattern of guilt-tripping or shifting blame?
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Some users are turning to AI as a social rehearsal space, says Dr. Nina Vasan, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford University and the founder and director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation. People gravitate to these tools because they’re “trying to get the words right before they risk the relationship,” she says. That might mean asking their LLM of choice to draft texts to friends, edit emails to their boss, help them figure out what questions to ask on a first date, or navigate tricky group-chat dynamics.
Vasan has also seen people use AI tools to craft dating-app profiles, respond to passive-aggressive family members, and set boundaries they’ve never before been able to articulate. “Some use it to rehearse difficult conversations before having them,” she says. “Others process social interactions afterward, essentially asking AI, ‘Did I handle that OK?’” ChatGPT and other LLMs, she says, have become a third party in many of our most intimate conversations.
Meet the new relationship referee
Consulting AI isn’t always a welcome development. Some young people, in particular, now use LLMs to generate “receipts,” deploying AI-backed answers as proof that they’re right.
“They use AI to try to create these airtight arguments where they can analyze a friend’s statements or a boyfriend’s statements, or they especially like to use it with their parents,” says Jimmie Manning, a professor of communication studies at the University of Nevada, where he’s also the director of the Relational Communication Research Laboratory. (None of his students have presented him with an AI-generated receipt yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time, he muses.) A teen might copy and paste a text from her mom into ChatGPT, for example, and ask if her parents are being unreasonably strict—and then present them with the evidence that yes, in fact, they are.
“They’re trying to get affirmation from AI, and you can guess how AI responds to them, because it’s here for you,” Manning says.
Using LLMs in this way turns relationships into adversarial negotiations, he adds. When people turn to AI for validation, they’re usually not considering their friend or romantic partner or parent’s perspective. Plus, shoving “receipts” in someone’s face can feel like an ambush. Those on the receiving end typically don’t respond well. “People are still wary of the algorithm entering their intimate lives,” Manning says. “There’s this authenticity question that we’re going to face as a culture.” When he asks his students how their friends or partners responded, they usually say: “Oh, he came up with excuses,” or “She just rolled her eyes.”
“It’s not really helping,” he says. “It’s just going to escalate the situation without any kind of resolution.”
What’s at stake
Outsourcing social tasks to AI is “deeply understandable,” Vasan says, “and deeply consequential.” It can support healthier communication, but it can also short-circuit emotional growth. On the more helpful side of things, she’s seen people with social anxiety finally ask someone on a date because Gemini helped them draft the message. Other times, people use it in the middle of an argument—not to prove they’re right, but to consider how the other person might be feeling, and to figure out how to say something in a way that will actually land.
“Instead of escalating into a fight or shutting down entirely, they’re using AI to step back and ask: ‘What’s really going on here? What does my partner need to hear? How can I express this without being hurtful?’” she says. In those cases, “It’s helping people break out of destructive communication patterns and build healthier dynamics with the people they love most.”
Yet that doesn’t account for the many potentially harmful ways people are using LLMs. “I see people who’ve become so dependent on AI-generated responses that they describe feeling like strangers in their own relationships,” Vasan says. “AI in our social lives is an amplifier: It can deepen connection, or it can hollow it out.” The same tool that helps someone communicate more thoughtfully, she says, can also help them avoid being emotionally present.
Plus, when you regularly rely on a chatbot as an arbiter or conversational crutch, it’s possible you’ll erode important skills like patience, listening, and compromise. People who use AI intensely or in a prolonged manner may find that the tool skews their social expectations, because they begin expecting immediate replies and 24/7 availability. “You have something that’s always going to answer you,” Wood says. “The chatbot is never going to cancel on you for going out to dinner. It’s never going to really push back on you, so that friction is gone.” Of course, friction is inevitable in even the healthiest relationships, so when people become used to the alternative, they can lose patience over the slightest inconvenience.
Then there’s the back-and-forth engagement that makes relationships work. If you grab lunch with a friend, you’ll probably take turns sharing stories and talking about your own lives. “However, the chatbot is never going to be, like, ‘Hey, hang on, Rachel, can I talk about me for a while?’” Wood says. “You don’t have to practice listening skills—that reciprocity is missing.” That imbalance can subtly recalibrate what people expect from real conversations.
Plus, every relationship requires compromise. When you spend too much time with a bot, that skill begins to atrophy, Wood says, because the interaction is entirely on the user’s terms. “The chatbot is never going to ask you to compromise, because it’s never going to say no to you,” she adds. “And life is full of no’s.”
The illusion of a second opinion
Researchers don’t yet have hard data that provides a sense of how outsourcing social tasks to AI affects relationship quality or overall well-being. “We as a field don’t have the science for it, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing going on. It just means we haven’t measured it yet,” says Dr. Karthik V. Sarma, a health AI scientist and physician at the University of California, San Francisco, where he founded the AI in Mental Health Research Group. “In the absence of that, the old advice remains good for almost any use of almost anything: moderation and patterns are key.”
Greater AI literacy is essential, too, Sarma says. Many people use LLMs without understanding exactly how and why they respond in certain ways. Say, for example, you’re planning to propose to your partner, but you want to check-in with people close to you first to confirm it’s the right move. Your best friend’s opinion will be valuable, Sarma says. But if you ask the bot? Don’t put too much weight on its words. “The chatbot doesn’t have its own positionality at all,” Sarma says. “Because of the way technology works, it’s actually much more likely to become more of a reflection of your own positionality. Once you’ve molded it enough, of course it’s going to agree with you, because it’s kind of like another version of you. It’s more of a mirror.”
Looking ahead
When Pat Pataranutaporn thinks about the effects of long-term AI usage, his main question is this: Is it limiting our ability to express ourselves? Or does it help people express themselves better? As founding director of the cyborg psychology research group and co-director of MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI research program, Pataranutaporn is interested in ways that people can use AI to promote human flourishing, pro-social interaction, and human-to-human interaction.
The goal is to use this technology to “help people be better, gain more agency, and feel that they’re in control of their lives,” he says, “rather than having technology constrain them like social media or previous technologies.”
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In part, that means using AI to gain the skills or confidence to talk to people face-to-face, rather than allowing the tool to replace human relationships. You can also use LLMs to help finesse your ideas and take them to the next level, as opposed to substitutes for original thought. “The idea or intent needs to be very clear and strong at the beginning,” Pataranutaporn says. “And then maybe AI could help augment or enhance it.” Before asking ChatGPT to compose a Valentine’s Day love letter, he suggests asking yourself: What is your unique perspective that AI can help bring to fruition?
Of course, individual users are at the mercy of a bigger force: the companies that develop these tools. Exactly how people use AI tools, and whether they bolster or weaken relationships, hinges on tech companies making their platforms healthier, Vasan says. That means intentionally designing tools to strengthen human capacity, rather than quietly replacing it.
“We shouldn’t design AI to perform relationships for us—we should design it to strengthen our ability to have them,” she says. “The key question isn’t whether AI is involved. It’s whether it’s helping you show up more human or letting you hide. We’re running a massive uncontrolled experiment on human intimacy, and my concern isn’t that AI will make our messages better. It’s that we’ll forget what our own voice sounds like.”
