Recently in the evening, my new boyfriend and I spewed ourselves.
I accuse him of succumbing to his uneasy thoughts.
“It's hard to get out of my head,” David said. “The mental spiral is part of the nature of sensitivity. Then there's an emotional overflow.”
“Well, the spiral is bad,” said me, the woman who spiraled.
Our different communication styles facilitated a tense exchange. I'm practical and direct inclined, but he's contemplative and conceptual.
I felt I could benefit from the mediator. So I turned to ChatGpt, a new relationship consultant.
AI enters chat
A recent national survey by Match shows that nearly half of Generation Z use artificial intelligence more for dating advice than any other generation. Anecdotally, I know of a woman who consults AI chatbots about casual, serious relationships. They are crushed, upload screenshots of long text threads for dissection, measure long-term compatibility, resolve disagreements, and even make sexts resonate.
Kat, who uses ChatGpt to weed dating prospects using ChatGpt, told me it was pretty objective. If emotions could get in the way, the chatbot helped her to maintain her standards.
“I feel like more people give me better advice than my friends, and better advice than my therapist,” said Kat, who asked me to go in her name due to concerns that using AI could endanger future romantic connections. “With friends, we're all walking around with our heads cut off when it comes to emotional situations.”
When apps are challenging how to find our old connections and intimacy, adding another layer of technology to your date seems ironic. But can Kat get to work on anything? Perhaps, seemingly neutral AI is a smart tool for solving relationship problems, except for human baggage.
For journalistic purposes, I decided to immerse myself in trends.
Let's see what ChatGpt is saying about this…
Based on the theory that couples should seek treatment before major problems arise, I have proposed to turn to AI chatbots for advice from boyfriends who are under 6 months old, assess bot feedback and share their results. David (he has no last name either!), an artist who has always been involved in good experimental projects, agreed to the pitch.
Our first foray into couples' counseling via ChatGpt began with questions proposed by the bots to discuss the health of our relationship. Did David have the resources to help him manage his stress and anxiety? He did – he was undergoing treatment, exercise, and had supportive friends and family. References to his anxiety sent him tangentially.
He recalls that he is a “sensitivity artist type.” He felt that women who might theoretically prefer it didn't want to deal with actually emotionally sensitive male partners.
“I can't flare my wings, but I'm sure I'm emotionally vulnerable,” David said.
He was open. But I spiraled him, projected assumptions, and condemned the monologue.
While he was chewing on the big ideas, I tried to bring the conversation back to our interpersonal friction. That's where ChatGpt came out. I recorded the conversation and uploaded the transcript to the bot. And I asked a question. (Our chat has been heavily edited to be concise – it speaks a lot.)
David was incredible. “It feels like a cliché,” he said.
deflectionI thought. I go back to chatgpt and read:
That was a terrible summary. Did I carry burnout levels of emotional labor in this early stage of the relationship, as ChatGpt suggested?
Promote objectivity
Humans have brought me back to reality.
“It may be true that you are doing more emotional labor. [in that moment] Or at an individual level. “They're a great way to get to know them,” said Myra Cheng, an AI researcher and a PhD student at Stanford University.
Materials where large language models (LLMs) are trained, such as ChatGpt, Claude, and Gemini – most often, the internet has “a huge bias in America, white people and men,” she said.
And that means there are all patterns of cultural ratios and bias, including stereotypes in which women disproportionately engage in emotional labor in their work and relationships.
Cheng was part of a research team comparing the two datasets. Each one is made up of personal advice. A second dataset consisting of one human-written dataset that corresponds to the real situation and a judgment created by LLMS in response to a post from AITA (“A** Hole?”) on Reddit.
This study found that LLMS consistently exhibits a higher percentage of psychofancy (overall agreement or flattering with users) than humans do.
Regarding soft skills issues such as advice, AI chatbot sycophancy can be particularly dangerous, Cheng said. In a recent case revealing the dangers of Sycophantic Bot, a man who had an episode of man disease said that ChatGpt's affirmation prevented him from seeking help.
So I changed my tuck in search of something closer to the objectivity of a biased bot.
There it was again: I was stuck doing emotional labor. I accused ChatGpt of lack of balance.
“Why do you get 'clear communication'? ” David asked me as if I had chosen those words.
At this point, I asked Faith Drew, a licensed marriage and family therapist based in Arizona, who was a family therapist who wrote about the topic.
According to Drew, it is a classic case of triangulation. Triangulation is a coping strategy in a relationship where a third party (e.g., a friend, parent, AI, etc. is brought about to facilitate tension between two people.
Whether the source is a bot or a friend, triangulation is worth it. “AI can help because it integrates information very quickly,” Drew said.
However, if you don't see the partners of the equation, triangulation can fail.
“One person goes outside and tries to get the answer for himself — “I just talk to AI,” she said.
The bot may not even have the ability to hold me accountable if they don't supply all the details they need, she said. Triangulation in this case is valuable, she said, “If we are asking the bots the right questions, “What is my role in conflict?”
Breakthrough
I reconcile the chatbot for neutrality and accountability. “Use a language you are not responsible for,” I ordered. Then I sent it the following text from David:
Before I even have the chance to hear, I feel like you are accuse me of not listening. I make myself available and am vulnerable to you.
“What am I missing on my edge?” asked chatgpt.
After much flattery, it finally answered:
I found the response to be simple and revelation. Plus, it was accurate.
He's been picking up a lot of lazy people in a relationship recently. He made me dinner.
I thought about the points that Drew did about the importance of putting work into our relationship, especially in times of unpleasantness, rather than relying on AI.
“You can sit in pain with your partner – that's true,” she said. “It's okay to not have the answer. It's okay to empathize and not know how to fix things. And I think that's a place where relationships are very special.
This is my takeaway. ChatGpt gave us a bit of a glimpse into our relationship and its dynamics. Relationships are fluid and chatbots can only capture snapshots. I called out to AI in a moment of tension. We were able to see how that reflection can fuel our discrepancies. ChatGpt could be in a hurry to choose a side and often decided that something was too fast to be a pattern.
Humans don't always think and act in predictable patterns. Chemistry is a major factor in compatibility. If an AI chatbot can't feel the chemistry between people – feel it and recognize the magic that occurs in three-dimensional space between two imperfect people – when it comes to things as important as relationships, it's hard to put trust in machines.
Several times, I felt that ChatGpt gave objective and creative feedback, provided effective analysis of communication styles, and eased some disagreements.
But it took a lot of work to make it interesting somewhere. Ultimately, I want to invest that time and energy, what ChatGpt might call my emotional labor, into my relationships.
