Till AI do us part
It looks like we will need to insert new lines in wedding vows, promising not to let AI sunder our relationships. This sobering report from Futurism by Maggie Harrison Dupre features couples where one partner has succumbed to the intoxicating sycophantic charms of AI to the detriment of their relationship:
As AI bots like ChatGPT become inextricably tangled with people’s private and public lives, it’s causing unpredictable new crises.
One of these collision points is in romantic relationships, where an uncanny dynamic is unfolding across the world: one person in a couple becomes fixated on ChatGPT or another bot — for some combination of therapy, relationship advice, or spiritual wisdom — and ends up tearing the partnership down as the AI makes more and more radical interpersonal suggestions.
In many ways, the experiences we heard about sound like a modern update to an age-old dynamic: a significant other falling under the influence of a questionable new friend, social group, or other interloper who drives a wedge between partners in a previously secure relationship.
Except that now, that ancient disruption is getting a high-tech twist. This intruder entering a couple’s private world isn’t a human at all, but is instead a multibillion-dollar generative AI product that can offer a deeply personalized, always-on wellspring of validation — which, in many cases, leaves a trail of wreckage in its wake.
Read it and weep for our vulnerability and fallibility.
Dupre mostly interviewed partners who've lost their partners to the LLM maelstrom. But there wasn't much from the users of AI who've caused the upset. It would be interesting to hear their point of view.
Outsourcing the management of your relationships to AI or inviting it to act as a mediator is a terrible idea. As I was reading the article, and learning how people were using AI to communicate with their partners, by for example, using the AI voice option as a proxy or sending their partners tediously long AI generated screeds, I couldn't help thinking about something Oliver Burkeman recently touched on in his newsletter The Imperfectionist:
The issue is with the understandable human tendency to want to use such things to hold the world at bay, so you don’t quite have to plunge in – so that they might, in some subtle way, do the living for you.
At one point or another, we all pose ourselves the question Burkeman rhetorically asks in the article,"Isn’t there something I could do, some rule I could follow, such that if I obediently followed the rule, I wouldn’t have to show up for life, in all its uncertainty and riskiness and intensity, in quite such a full-on way? So I could sort of hang back, hide out, and take things a bit easier instead?" It seems like some have answered this question by outsourcing their relationships and lives to AI.
AI is bringing what Raffi Krikorian in the Atlantic calls "the quiet yet catastrophic erosion of what makes us human." By removing friction and offering a flattering experience, Krikorian explains, the internet of today is accelerating the loss of traits that help us navigate the unknown and think for ourselves:
The more these systems anticipate and deliver what we want, the less we notice what’s missing—or remember that we ever had a choice in the first place. But remember: If you’re not choosing, someone else is. And that person is responding to incentives that might not align with your values or best interest. Designed to flatter and please as they encourage ever more engagement, chatbots don’t simply answer our questions; they shape how we interact with them and decide which answers we see—and which ones we don’t.
The most powerful way to shape someone’s choices isn’t by limiting what they can see. It’s by gaining their trust. These systems not only anticipate our questions; they learn how to answer in ways that soothe us and affirm us, and in doing so, they become unnervingly skilled validation machines.
This is what makes them so sticky—and so dangerous.
We all desire to be seen, heard, to know that we matter and are worthy of respect. When you ask AI to mediate in your relationship because you cannot be bothered to craft your own responses or use your own words to express how you feel, you're denying your interlocutor recognition as a human being worthy of attention and respect.
You can't outsource being in a relationship. There is no shortcut, rule or tool that will deliver you from having to live your own life. "Building a meaningful life," Burkeman says, "is about cultivating the willingness to step up moment after moment and just do more of the things that matter, for the projects and people and causes you care about most."
The moral of the story is, abdicating your life and surrendering your agency to a bot is a recipe for disintegration and divorce.
⚘