Lindsey Hall, a Texas-based writer, suspected that the man she was dating was using artificial intelligence. Not knowing where things were going, she asked him directly what made him want to be with her.

“You’re funny, smart, pretty,” she summed up her response. “The way it was written was very cold and formal and very ChatGPT. I remember being very turned off by that.”

One night, about five months after dating, she stumbled 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 she had written. He apologized after being confronted and they dated for a few more months before breaking up.

“I felt like he was in a relationship with me, him and the robot,” he said.

AI is taking on a new role in human relationships. A Pew Research Center survey released last month found that one in five adults ages 18 to 29 said they used AI chatbots for emotional support or advice. A new YouGov survey found that 13% of American adults and 23% 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 artificial intelligence told Business Insider that problems can arise when people start relying on artificial intelligence instead of talking to their partners. Chatbots are also prone to over-validation, which can make it difficult 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 that while the impact of AI on jobs and the workplace is evident and widely discussed, she believes the impact on human relationships could be even greater and could take years to manifest.

“AI is changing the relational basis of society,” he said.

Turn to chatbots for emotional support

Trusting a chatbot about your relationship may be easier than talking to another person because there’s no social risk, according to Ashleigh Golden, a licensed clinical psychologist who works in artificial intelligence and mental health. It can also be validating, he said. While a colleague or friend may push you away and encourage you to consider your own behavior, chatbots may not.

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

“You have the security of revealing it to a stranger plus the feeling of being deeply understood without any risk of being seen,” Golden said.

Wood said interacting with a chatbot also does not require many of the skills essential to maintaining human relationships, such as patience, listening, negotiation, empathy and compromise.

“Those muscles will atrophy,” he said, “which in turn will make our relationships worse because we don’t practice listening to each other and holding space for each other.”

Sharing with a chatbot instead of your partner can also feel like a betrayal to them, said Idit Sharoni, a licensed marriage and family therapist who specializes in couples therapy and affair recovery. He said that if you trust AI about your relationship, your partner may feel like the chatbot has more access to your inner world than they do.

“It may look like emotional infidelity,” he said.

A recent survey of 3,500 American users of the dating app Hily found that 70% of Gen Z respondents and 60% of millennials would not date someone who relies on AI to make sense of their feelings. More than half said they would feel uncomfortable if a couple discussed their shared sex life with AI.

When using a chatbot can help

Keven Cotton, controller of the Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington, D.C., said communication hasn’t always been his strong suit during their six years of marriage, but that talking to AI has helped. After a disagreement with his wife, he said ChatGPT helped him consider how they may have misunderstood each other and think about how to reopen the conversation.

He believes that talking about his relationship with AI has worked for him because the therapy gave him a solid foundation to examine his own behavior instead of seeking validation.

“You have to work to maximize what you get from AI,” he said. “If you approach it from the victim’s point of view, you will get 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. Problems can arise, he said, when AI is used to interpret how the other person feels or make a decision based on unilateral facts.

If AI helps you work through your feelings, Wood recommends sharing it with your partner so it doesn’t happen in secret. He suggested saying something like, “Hey, this is what the chatbot reflects back to me. What do you think of that?”

Couples may also want to set 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 carried over to the other person.

He said AI can be useful as a “preprocessing space,” helping someone turn an initial feeling of disorder into something they can pass on to their partner, but that the risk arises 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 engaging in a relationship.

“AI can’t appear for you,” he said.

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