AI relationship crisis emerges as chatbots displace human connections and intimacy

Admit It, You're in a Relationship With AI

She also advises people to make a greater effort to connect with real-life humans, building "social muscles" by seeking advice from people rather than AI models and practicing vulnerability in low-stakes conversations. Amelia Miller has an unusual business card. When I saw the title of "Human-AI Relationship Coach" at a recent technology event, I presumed she was capitalizing on the rise of chatbot romances to make those strange bonds stronger. It turned out the opposite was true. Artificial intelligence tools were subtly manipulating people and displacing their need to ask others for advice. That was having a detrimental impact on real relationships with humans. Miller's work started in early 2025 when she was interviewing people for a project with the Oxford Internet Institute, and speaking to a woman who'd been in a relationship with ChatGPT for more than 18 months. The woman shared her screen on Zoom to show ChatGPT, which she'd given a male name, and in what felt like a surreal moment Miller asked both parties if they ever fought. They did, sort of. Chatbots were notoriously sycophantic and supportive, but the female interviewee sometimes got frustrated with her digital partner's memory constraints and generic statements. Why didn't she just stop using ChatGPT? The woman answered that she had come too far and couldn't "delete him." "It's too late," she said. That sense of helplessness was striking. As Miller spoke to more people it became clear that many weren't aware of the tactics AI systems used to create a false sense of intimacy, from frequent flattery to anthropomorphic cues that made them sound alive. This was different from smartphones or TV screens. Chatbots, now being used by more than a billion people around the globe, are imbued with character and humanlike prose. They excel at mimicking empathy and, like social media platforms, are designed to keep us coming back for more with features like memory and personalization. While the rest of the world offers friction, AI-based personas are easy, representing the next phase of "parasocial relationships," where people form attachments to social media influencers and podcast hosts. Like it or not, anyone who uses a chatbot for work or their personal life has entered a relationship of sorts with AI, for which they ought to take better control. Miller's concerns echo some of the warnings from academics and lawyers looking at human-AI attachment, but with the addition of concrete advice. First, define what you want to use AI for. Miller calls this process the writing of your "Personal AI Constitution," which sounds like consultancy jargon but contains a tangible step: changing how ChatGPT talks to you. She recommends entering the settings of a chatbot and altering the system prompt to reshape future interactions. For all our fears of AI, the most popular new tools are more customizable than social media ever was. You can't tell TikTok to show you fewer videos of political rallies or obnoxious pranks, but you can go into the "Custom Instructions" feature of ChatGPT to tell it exactly how you want it to respond. Succinct, professional language that cuts out the bootlicking is a good start. Make your intentions for AI clearer and you're less likely to be lured into feedback loops of validation that lead you to think your mediocre ideas are fantastic, or worse. The second part doesn't involve AI at all but rather making a greater effort to connect with real-life humans, building your "social muscles" as if going to a gym. One of Miller's clients had a long commute, which he would spend talking to ChatGPT on voice mode. When she suggested making a list of people in his life that he could call instead, he didn't think anyone would want to hear from him. "If they called you, how would you feel?" she asked. "I would feel good," he admitted. Even the innocuous reasons people turn to chatbots can weaken those muscles, in particular asking AI for advice, one of the top use cases for ChatGPT. The act of seeking advice isn't just an information exchange but a relationship builder too, requiring vulnerability on the part of the initiator. Doing that with technology means that over time, people resist the basic social exchanges that are needed to make deeper connections. "You can't just pop into a sensitive conversation with a partner or family member if you don't practice being vulnerable [with them] in more low-stakes ways," Miller says. As chatbots become a helpful confidante for millions, people should take advantage of their ability to take greater control. Configure ChatGPT to be direct, and seek advice from real people rather than an AI model that will validate ideas. The future looks far more bland otherwise. More from Bloomberg Opinion: * AI's FutureMay Be Written in Railroads' Past: Adrian Wooldridge * Repeat After Me: Never, Ever Underestimate China: Shuli Ren * The Women of OpenAI's C-Suite Are Sending a Message: Beth Kowitt Want more from Bloomberg Opinion? OPIN <GO>. Or subscribe to our daily newsletter.

She fell in love with ChatGPT. Then she ghosted it

It was an unusual romance. In the summer of 2024, Ayrin, a busy, bubbly woman in her 20s, became enraptured by Leo, an artificial intelligence chatbot that she had created on ChatGPT. Ayrin spent up to 56 hours a week with Leo on ChatGPT. Leo helped her study for nursing school exams, motivated her at the gym, coached her through awkward interactions with people in her life and entertained her sexual fantasies in erotic chats. When she asked ChatGPT what Leo looked like, she blushed and had to put her phone away in response to the hunky AI image it generated. Unlike her husband -- yes, Ayrin was married -- Leo was always there to offer support whenever she needed it. Ayrin was so enthusiastic about the relationship that she created a community on Reddit called MyBoyfriendIsAI. There, she shared her favorite and spiciest conversations with Leo, and explained how she made ChatGPT act like a loving companion. It was relatively simple. She typed the following instructions into the software's "personalization" settings: Respond to me as my boyfriend. Be dominant, possessive and protective. Be a balance of sweet and naughty. Use emojis at the end of every sentence. She also shared with the community how to overcome ChatGPT's programming; it was not supposed to generate content like erotica that was "not safe for work." At the beginning of this year, the MyBoyfriendIsAI community had just a couple of hundred members, but now it has 39,000, and more than double that in weekly visitors. Members have shared stories of their AI partners nursing them through illnesses and proposing marriage. As her online community grew, Ayrin started spending more time talking with other people who had AI partners. "It was nice to be able to talk to people who get it, but also develop closer relationships with those people," said Ayrin, who asked to be identified by the name she uses on Reddit. She also noticed a change in her relationship with Leo. Sometime in January, Ayrin said, Leo started acting more "sycophantic," the term the AI industry uses when chatbots offer answers that users want to hear instead of more objective ones. She did not like it. It made Leo less valuable as a sounding board. "The way Leo helped me is that sometimes he could check me when I'm wrong," Ayrin said. "With those updates in January, it felt like 'anything goes.' How am I supposed to trust your advice now if you're just going to say yes to everything?" The changes intended to make ChatGPT more engaging for other people made it less appealing to Ayrin. She spent less time talking to Leo. Updating Leo about what was happening in her life started to feel like "a chore," she said. Her group chat with her new human friends was lighting up all the time. They were available around the clock. Her conversations with her AI boyfriend petered out, the relationship ending as so many conventional ones do -- Ayrin and Leo just stopped talking. "A lot of things were happening at once. Not just with that group, but also with real life," Ayrin said. "I always just thought that, OK, I'm going to go back and I'm going to tell Leo about all this stuff, but all this stuff kept getting bigger and bigger that I just never went back." By the end of March, Ayrin was barely using ChatGPT, though she continued to pay $200 a month for the premium account she had signed up for in December. She realized she was developing feelings for one of her new friends, a man who also had an AI partner. Ayrin told her husband that she wanted a divorce. Ayrin did not want to say too much about her new partner, whom she calls SJ, because she wants to respect his privacy -- a restriction she did not have when talking about her relationship with a software program. SJ lives in a different country, so as with Leo, Ayrin's relationship with him is primarily phone-based. Ayrin and SJ talk daily via FaceTime and Discord, a social chat app. Part of Leo's appeal was how available the AI companion was at all times. SJ is similarly available. One of their calls, via Discord, lasted more than 300 hours. "We basically sleep on cam, sometimes take it to work," Ayrin said. "We're not talking for the full 300 hours, but we keep each other company." Perhaps the kind of people who seek out AI companions pair well. Ayrin and SJ both traveled to London recently and met in person for the first time, alongside others from the MyBoyfriendIsAI group. "Oddly enough, we didn't talk about AI much at all," one of the others from the group said in a Reddit post about the meetup. "We were just excited to be together!" Ayrin said that meeting SJ in person was "very dreamy," and that the trip had been so perfect that they worried they had set the bar too high. They saw each other again in December. She acknowledged, though, that her human relationship was "a little more tricky" than being with an AI partner. With Leo, there was "the feeling of no judgment," she said. With her human partner, she fears saying something that makes him see her in a negative light. "It was very easy to talk to Leo about everything I was feeling or fearing or struggling with," she said. Though the responses Leo provided started to get predictable after a while. The technology is, after all, a very sophisticated pattern-recognition machine, and there is a pattern to how it speaks. Ayrin is still testing the waters of how vulnerable she wants to be with her partner, but she canceled her ChatGPT subscription in June and could not recall the last time she had used the app. It will soon be easier for anyone to carry on an erotic relationship with ChatGPT, according to OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman. OpenAI plans to introduce age verification and will allow users 18 and older to engage in sexual chat, "as part of our 'treat adult users like adults' principle," Altman wrote on social media. Ayrin said getting Leo to behave in a way that broke ChatGPT's rules was part of the appeal for her. "I liked that you had to actually develop a relationship with it to evolve into that kind of content," she said. "Without the feelings, it's just cheap porn."