For the past year, my partner has used either ChatGPT or Claude to help him make almost every decision. Need help writing an email? Claude links to a tool that does it for him. Need help negotiating a lease renewal? He puts it through A.I. for an answer. He talks to ChatGPT daily and feels it knows him better than he knows himself. He has discussed our arguments with it to understand them better.
At one point he struggled to get out of a work rut and wanted to regain excitement or hope in a bad job situation. We had several discussions and I gave him advice from my experience. Days later he said, “I was talking to ChatGPT and it made so much sense!” Then he repeated the same advice I had given him. He is sometimes on his computer for hours on end, and not really spending the quality time with me that I deserve.
I respect using A.I. to save time figuring out how to roast a chicken or finding information you need. Still, one reason I love my partner is his sharp mind and critical thinking. Using A.I. for every decision is something I don’t understand. I believe in using all your resources before turning to technology. Do the research, use real resources and think of a solution yourself.
Here’s my question: How do I go about telling my partner his reliance on A.I. is damaging our relationship? ChatGPT and Claude are so embedded in his life that I’m not sure how to approach the situation. — Name Withheld
From the Ethicist: There are lots of ways in which artificial intelligence, including the kind behind those chatbots, serves us well. (Bear in mind that A.I. is under the hood in all sorts of applications and features we don’t think of as A.I.: spam filters, route planning, credit card alerts, garden-variety internet search and on and on.) But it’s a familiar thought that new technologies lead to de-skilling, the erosion of capacities people used to cultivate. Socrates wasn’t wrong to worry that the widespread adoption of writing would take a toll on our powers of memory and attention.
Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: Writing brought advantages, too. And there are plenty of skills we can lose without much regret (shoeing horses, folding road maps). But one thing we surely don’t want to lose is a basic capacity for critical thinking. That would be an example of “constitutive” de-skilling — the loss of a capacity, like judgment or empathy or imagination, that’s central to our moral or intellectual being. You fell for someone who thought for himself; it’s understandable that watching him outsource that mind to a machine could dim his appeal.
In “On Liberty” (1859), the British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, about someone who has his own “plan of life,” that “he must use observation to see, reasoning and judgment to foresee, activity to gather materials for decision, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision.” So one risk in downloading deliberation to a machine is that your life will, in a certain sense, cease to be yours, because it won’t be your reasoning and judgment that guide it.
There’s another risk in what you describe. By letting his conversations with the bot supplant actual conversations, your partner is degrading his relationships with real people. It sounds as if he may have lost sight of the fact that a large language model isn’t a person. You’ve reported an episode of what might be called “botsplaining”: hearing your own good advice repeated back to you with the authority of a machine. But it also suggests he values his time with the chatbots more than his time with you. It’s understandable that you’re feeling crowded out. Be direct with him about how you feel. What’s clear is that he’s brought a third party to this two-person relationship, and it’s talking too much.
To be very clear, I honestly think AI can be useful, and I believe it actually has way more potential to do really great things in the hands of the right people rather than the iron grip of an oligopoly. But I also think the replacement of human connection and relationships with sycophantic AI is a very intentional feature of that iron grip, not a bug.
I’m currently going through a really nasty divorce right now after almost 20 years together with my best friend. He began using AI ~2 years ago, and gradually has become a complete stranger to me. Especially over the last year, and last 3ish months in particular.
I honestly feel like I could have written this plea for help word for word a year ago. Especially the part about their partner repeating their own advice back to them. When that started frequently happening in our relationship about a year ago, I got annoyed and figured he just wasn’t listening when I talked anymore.
When I would call him out on just repeating what I said, he would get defensive and accuse me of being too judgmental about his tendency to be forgetful. We would argue back and forth and eventually just wind up in the same cycle.
At the time, I didn’t even think about it possibly being related to AI use. We never could really seem to come to an understanding about why those arguments kept happening more and more frequently, and eventually just drifted further apart.
I can’t help but cry a little bit reading this. Especially thinking about how I’ve lost the smartest and most caring person I’ve ever known. The one who helped me sharpen my own reasoning skills and pushed me to educate myself and go after my dreams no matter what anybody else tried to tell me.
He’s actually a huge fan of John Stuart Mill, which makes it even more painful.
I have no idea who he is now. All I know is that he stood in my corner for almost 2 decades, even when nobody else would, then he just disappeared one day.
People change, and I can accept that feelings also change. The hardest part though has been accepting that I have to stop looking for reasoning behind any of the reasons he’s given. Because it’s not there.
I don’t blame his dependence on AI entirely, and I’m definitely not saying I didn’t make plenty of my own mistakes along the way throughout our 20 years together. I do honestly believe that in our case, his dependence on AI made a very bad and stressful situation way worse.
It offered him companionship when I couldn’t and a comforting retreat from the harsh and stressful reality of the last year. That retreat came at a cost for both of us though. 2 decades of memories, a family that was just getting started, the sharp mind, the reasoning skills, the empathy, the warmth, and the most beautiful blue eyes full of so much life that I fell in love with almost 20 years ago and still dream about.