Key Takeaways:
A growing cohort of young adults is outsourcing text messages, dating-app icebreakers and in-person conversation talking points to AI chatbots, raising questions about whether the tools are building confidence or eroding social skills.
Niharika Abbaraju uses artificial intelligence in her work as a cancer researcher. But when she leaves the lab, the tool becomes her conversation coach. ChatGPT helps her draft pickup lines for dating apps and icebreakers for parties. She'll even fire it up to formulate a response to the person standing next to her — calling up an AI summary when the conversation shifts to an unfamiliar book or article. The vibe she's going for: "Like, I read sometimes," she says.
Abbaraju, 20, is part of a growing cohort of young adults outsourcing deeply human tasks to AI. Many, struggling with social anxieties great or small, seek assistance ahead of face-to-face encounters. Others let their bots script text messages and mediate their dating lives as a digital Cyrano de Bergerac.
"Using bots as social buffers points to an epidemic of self-mistrust," Ashleigh Golden, a clinical psychologist and adjunct clinical professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine, said. "If you're running a text past AI to check whether it sounds OK, you're slowly teaching yourself that your own read can't be trusted."
The practice is especially problematic for the socially anxious. AI may help people avoid the sting of social missteps, but the relief is temporary, Golden said. The tool can become a crutch keeping people from trusting their own judgment.
Andrea Wallace, a 24-year-old personal trainer in Austin, Texas, said bot-generated messages are appearing more in chats with romantic partners. Texts from a man her friend was seeing had been unwieldy. Suddenly, they took on perfect grammar and syntax. "There is no way that this man who was struggling to type out 'there,' 'their' and 'they're' just sent this text message," Wallace said. Texts should be messy anyway, she added, because the intimacy comes from informality.
Lucas Dvorak, 22, uses AI all the time but steers clear of it when he texts his girlfriend. During a talk on the subject, she told him it would be lazy and unromantic of him to treat their conversations as another task to be hacked with AI. "She thinks it's kind of creepy, and I respect that," said Dvorak, who studies industrial engineering and data science at Northwestern University.
The Cost of Optimization
The trend is unfolding against a backdrop of rising AI adoption among younger demographics. ChatGPT reached 100 million weekly active users within two months of its launch in late 2022, and OpenAI has since expanded the platform's capabilities to include voice mode and image generation. Meta Platforms and Google have also embedded generative AI features into their consumer products, making chatbot assistance a tap away for billions of users.
Alexandra Friedman, a Seattle-based friendship and relationship coach, said it is acceptable to use AI to scaffold an uncomfortable conversation but not to lean on it throughout. AI is useful in crafting what to say, not how to say it — something users must cultivate without an intermediary. She advises limiting AI conversational role-play to once a week for recurring interactions or the day before a big event.
"You need to still have those skills yourself in conversation and communication," Abbaraju said. "You can use ChatGPT to help you build them, but not as 'Tell me what to say at every single moment in time when I'm with this person.'"
The tension between optimization and authenticity is unlikely to resolve as AI tools become more embedded in daily communication. Golden said the core risk is that users trade short-term social comfort for long-term atrophy of the very skills that make unscripted conversation meaningful. "Feeling uncomfortable is part of the human experience," Friedman said. "That's something technology can never feel."
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
