Commentary: AI will affect your social life, even if you've never used it

AI has become a kind of social sealant, filling the gaps in young people’s relationships, says Alice Lassman for the New York Times.

LONDON: I used all my savings to buy myself a Wi-Fi-enabled iPod Touch just short of my 13th birthday. Many of my memories follow from there: the portal to my formative experiences, the flutters of a first crush, the last text sent after our breakup. I learned romance through screens; I learned danger through screenshots. Like many Gen Z-ers, I see my Safari tabs as extensions of my most private inner world.

For most people my age, one of those tabs is often a chatbot.

When I write about artificial intelligence and intimacy, people tend to imagine AI girlfriends or tech fanatics. Only extreme users would use chatbots to manage their social and emotional lives, or so the thinking goes.

But in conversations with other Gen Z-ers, I’ve found that young people are relying emotionally on AI more than we realise.

That subtly changes our relationships, even with people who have never touched AI. When a flood of synthetic support enters the worlds of those around us, it distorts our mechanisms for intimacy and makes everyone a little lonelier.

TALKING TO CHATGPT BEFORE ANOTHER PERSON

In writing a book about AI and relationships, I interviewed people in their 20s and 30s across the United States and Europe about how they use chatbots. I found them through research calls, follow-ups with readers, friends of friends.

They let me into the most intimate corners of their psyches. I was sometimes the only person they’d ever told about their chatbot use.

Despite speaking to chatbots every day, most of them also maintained full social lives, and in many ways AI enriched them. Several interviewees told me that it helped them think about their relationships more clearly and deliberately.

But it also began to form the scaffolding of their consequential decision-making: encouraging breakups, de-escalating arguments that the chatbot had decided weren’t worth their time.

“If I’m more rational and less emotional, I’m doing good,” Lavish Daksh, a 21-year-old in Germany, told me. AI had allowed him to make more clearheaded decisions, he said. But he described wanting to strip emotion from his relationships entirely.

Another interviewee, a 27-year-old from Britain, said he used AI as “an advanced Google search” for his personal life, with the power to remember a sequence of emotion the next time he feels it. He felt more comfortable taking his feelings to ChatGPT before sharing them with another person. Intrusive thoughts are to be nullified; friends are there for lightness and laughter.

THE INTIMACY ECONOMY

Synthetic intimacy creates what economists call negative externalities – the hidden costs that fall not on the person making the choice but on the relationships that are changed, ever so slightly, around you.

Mike Jeffcoat, a psychotherapist of 14 years, told me that he doesn’t share the same challenging emotions with his friends that he shares with AI. He prefers to do his spiritual and emotional processing alone. “Who can and will be truthful, hold space and be competent with one’s confusing subconscious content?” he asked.

Intimacy is accumulated through repeated acts of exposure – touch, feelings, ideas, trust. It is the capital of human connection, transferring the sense to one another that we are seen, understood and safe.

Every time a chatbot performs a substitute “I understand you” or “I think this decision feels most you,” the words we have all come to rely on to convey human meaning are slightly cheapened, slightly less human.

It’s easy not to notice our friends withdrawing.

Intimate AI conversations are not uncommon: Nearly two-thirds of adolescents who use chatbots said they were searching primarily for friendship or advice, according to a recent survey.

But frequent AI use is often considered taboo. One 34-year-old I spoke to was afraid that the extent of her Claude use would “freak out” the guy she was seeing. After they broke up, she created an AI version of him to better understand their breakup.

“It’s a processing tool,” she shared with me – in confidence, having told nobody else in her life – so she could find closure on her own terms. If the attention economy of the 2010s made intimate life feel constantly public, the intimacy economy promised the opposite: relationships with one’s own chatbot, seen by no one else.

A LITTLE LESS UNFILTERED WITH ONE ANOTHER

AI has become a kind of social sealant, filling the gaps in young people’s relationships: coaching men to plan dates that outromance their rivals, supplying words of condolence our friends couldn’t quite find.

Lately, it’s stopped being so invisible. “So my AI told me …” is now a casual part of my friends’ conversations.

One friend texted me after he had come home from a good date, for once, elated and desperate to share it with someone. With his roommates asleep, he primed his chatbot: “Be my flatmate after I’ve just come home from this date.” I quickly texted back, so he spoke to me. But if I hadn’t, that conversation would have strengthened his connection to Claude instead, at our friendship’s expense.

New technology tends to distort our existing social equilibrium. Once smartphones entered the fray, being in a friend group meant being constantly contactable, a participant in group chats. AI hasn’t slowed our communication, but it may be changing what we communicate.

Now that there’s a tool on hand to smooth and rationalise the bumpiness of our thoughts, we find ourselves being a little less unfiltered with one another, a little less vulnerable.

I don’t use Claude for my personal life. But like most Gen Z-ers, I’m more susceptible to its temptations than I think I am.

My phone has always been a part of me. Like a cyborg, I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t attached to my person, an extension of myself, of my brain, tucked safely into my pocket. Young people are digital natives; of course the itchiness of our feelings has a fix in this little device of ours. Our friendships may suffer for it.

Alice Lassman writes about artificial intelligence and is the author of an upcoming book about the effect of technology on intimacy. This article originally appeared* in The New York Times. *