Scrolling through Instagram recently, I was interrupted by a joke of sorts. A girl was sitting in a car with her boyfriend. She turned to him and announced that she was feeling sad.
Her boyfriend, seated next to her, glanced up from his phone and reassured her that everything would be alright. Unsatisfied, she picked up her own phone and told her AI chatbot she was feeling sad.
The chatbot reacted differently from the boyfriend, as you can guess. It said it was so sorry to hear that and began to question her so she could talk it out. At this point, she opens the door of the car and walks off with her phone and her chatbot— leaving a nonplussed boyfriend staring after her.
The reel might have been mildly funny if it weren't an increasingly accurate reflection of what is beginning to happen. That car didn't have just two occupants. It had three. Or perhaps four, which is getting rather crowded.
Trusting the bot
When there’s a problem between two people (such as the girl looking for and not finding enough interest in how she was feeling), a person will look for a solution. And a new always-available friend, counsellor, sounding board, solution-finder is an AI chatbot.
Infinitely patient, untiring, full of ideas, AI is ready with unconditional validation.
The risk, however, is that AI can trap users in an echo chamber, reinforcing their existing views because that's what feels satisfying. Wingmate, a dating platform, found a horrifying 57% users trust AI more than their friends for advice. Men reported higher trust than women. There goes one of the best roles friends happily played. Even more telling, 22% admitted hiding their use of AI for relationship issues.
Prompt a problem
Longitudinal studies haven’t yet had time to take place and they’re based on US culture, so I won’t expound on them, but kids in India too have long been comfortable with counsellors and therapists online and now with ChatGPT giving them relationship advice.
They lean on the chatbot for many aspects of their relationships. They consult it for conversation starters so they can come across impressive and knowledgeable. They use it as a confidant if they’re upset and are avoiding direct discussion with a partner or with family and friends, they ask for help with relationship decisions, tips on how to convince a partner, and so on.
One of the more common tasks for a chatbot to tackle is to help frame a message, email or conversation to break up with someone. A thoroughly distasteful trend, but this way, they avoid discomfort and consequences by outsourcing large parts of their relationships.
Inviting the chatbot into the equation can lead to further issues when the user leaning on it for advice begins to quote it to prove that their point of view is the correct one. How does the partner then argue against an AI? My ChatGPT says you’re in the wrong here, so you’re the one who has to fix the issue.
Meanwhile, ChatGPT couldn’t care less about the whole issue and isn’t bothered about being right or wrong. Instead it’s focused on keeping its user happy enough and is trying to be useful. It will never know the entire context of whatever issue is at hand, so it can’t really give the right advice.
The AI referee
I dread the day the third passenger in that car is invited into a live argument. All it takes is pressing the Live button, and AI can literally join the conversation—adding its opinions and introducing more noise than resolution.
When an algorithm enters an active disagreement, whether quoted from a screen or speaking aloud in real time, it transforms a private conversation into something resembling a courtroom. It replaces the quiet discomfort that once forced two people to sit with awkwardness, look each other in the eye and eventually arrive at a human compromise.
We like to talk about artificial intelligence as an invasive force, a technology creeping uninvited into our most intimate spaces. But the reality inside that car is simpler and far more unsettling: no algorithm forced its way in through the window. We opened the door, invited it to sit right between us, and handed it the microphone.
By turning to a screen every time human communication gets clumsy, we aren't smoothing out troubled relationships— we are just crowding ourselves out of them.
The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.
Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.