Doomscrolling last week, I came across a video of a woman confessing that she goes to an AI Chatbot for advice concerning the guy she’s currently seeing rather than “boring” her friends with boy issues.
My heart sank as I watched in horror as she took viewers through her conversations with a robot. Thousands of views and hundreds of likes. How have we gotten here? Has dating hit a new low?
Not once have I considered asking a robot for advice over my friends. My love life this year really isn’t anything to write home about (weeks wasted texting, Hinge dates agreed that never actually happened, a three-week situationship and a bunch of boys I have no energy to reply to). Even then, I would share updates with my friends.
Sure, sometimes we drone on and so do our friends. But I’d rather they drone on at me, or vice versa, than we stop telling each other things in favour of telling a computer. I’ve seen my friends through heartbreak; they’ve brought me back from the worst breakup of my life. We wouldn’t have been able to do that if we didn’t know each other for years or the nuances of each other’s personalities. They have been there for me, showed up at my house, made me dinner. A chatbot doesn’t know the full story and could never make me soup when I’m sad (yet).
Even now, the idea of it seems dystopian. But it wasn’t the first time I encountered someone doing this with AI. A few years ago, waiting in line for a cafe, my friend and I stood behind a woman asking ChatGPT what the best response to “his” text was, and how long to wait to reply. She was taking the human connection out of her human connection. Of course, every situation is individual; maybe she felt like she couldn’t ask her friends or may not have had anyone to ask on such short notice. I didn’t consider the fact that other people might be doing this regularly for specific dating advice.
What happened to thinking for ourselves or reading a dating column, looking for advice from actual humans?
Gen Z are far too familiar with the loneliness epidemic, the rise of singleness, and so-called sexless generation (Social media won’t let us forget it). And AI could possibly exacerbate that further by creating emotional distance in friendships. (It’s fine if we aren’t having sex, at least we are socialised…for now).
The idea of asking an AI Chatbot for relationship advice makes me feel the same as reading an essay or a book written by one. I don’t want a smattering of artificial intelligence over my relationship as much as I don’t want to read something churned out from a system. I want the raw, the real emotions, the saying-the-wrong-thing that you need your friends to tell you how to save the situation.
I want a bottle of wine in a pub on a Friday night and updates from my friends, or to be crying with them on the sofa or even encouraging them, telling them that what he said was stupid, he didn’t mean it. I want them to pour their heart out to me rather than going to a system.
Like I said, I know it’s not always possible to go to friends with problems, but there are so many other places to get advice from real people. I hate to think we place more importance on a robot than we do on other people, or even ourselves.
Everything AI knows about love is to never use AI for love. But who knows, in ten years maybe we will be marrying robots instead…
Livia x
Leave a Reply