Making sense of feelings is hard, and articulating them is even harder. So when my friend shared his break-up message with me to check, I understood why he’d outsourced the messy work to AI. It was well-written, clearly structured and prompted to avoid the clichés I’d heard (and used) throughout my own dating history. But when I asked how much of it felt true, he found it hard to answer. A complicated, heart-led experience had been repackaged into a rational summary; even he’d lost sight of the truth. Of course, none of this is unsurprising, given that a computer can’t feel.
This anecdote is far from unusual. A recent study found that among daters who use AI, nearly half of under 30s had employed a chatbot to help end a relationship. It’s arguably an efficient choice in a time-poor society, but like everything in modern life, it comes at a cost, whether that’s immediately obvious or not. The older I get (and the more therapy I’ve had), the more I realise difficult emotions are a guide, and sitting with discomfort is how we grow. Using AI to sift through complicated emotions might act as a temporary fix, but the underlying feelings, or their roots, won’t magically disappear; they’ll simply be left unprocessed and likely manifest in some other form.
And it’s not just uncomfortable endings that are being outsourced, but the beginnings of relationships too. This year, there’s been a reported rise in “chatfishing”, where the gulf between witty online messages and flat exchanges on an IRL date is so vast, AI seems the only viable explanation. Somehow this is sadder to me than the crafted break-up text; it suggests that people don’t back their own voice enough to flirt, or that they simply don’t have the energy. Again, I get it; I have spent hours talking to incompatible people, and if it had been available, I might have outsourced the upfront efforts to AI. But when I eventually met my now-husband on Hinge, it was precisely the uniquely silly messages between us that made me excited to meet him. In fact, an unfortunate spelling mistake on his end (something AI is unlikely to do) set the tone for the slightly antagonistic teasing that holds us together to this day.
At any stage of a relationship, computer code cannot make us immune to vulnerability and rejection, and nor should it. Such experiences help build emotional resilience. By outsourcing our feelings to AI, I believe we risk a collective atrophy. A flattening of the human experience that could have disastrous effects on the social contract that binds us together. We need each other, with our diverse thoughts, quirks and flaws. Instructing a computer to package our messy feelings into something palatable deprives not only ourselves, but others of true connection. Some of the strongest friendships I have were built from untangling knotty situations together, and some of my funniest dating stories come from enduring searingly awkward interactions. If you’ve ever been dumped in a Russian sauna, wearing a swimming costume and a felt hat, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
I explore the costs of denying our emotions in my debut novel, The Carrier, where people can pay to outsource unwanted feelings to a subclass of women who feel on their behalf. The premise may push emotional labour to its fictional extreme, yet readers say the concept rings uncomfortably true. Women, in particular, resonate with the experience of managing other people’s emotions, and how this burden becomes heavy over time. As with AI, it’s the bypassing that is destructive here. There’s a difference between asking someone to help navigate discomfort and expecting them to take it away. The former can foster connection; the latter depletes both parties and can lead to emotional and physical burnout.
But to offer some hope, both in my book and in reality, there is growing resistance to outsourcing culture. Earlier this year, the writer Kathryn Jezer-Morton coined the term “friction-maxxing” – calling a friend instead of messaging, reading instead of scrolling, and interrogating your feelings instead of turning to a computer. People adopting this trend report improved attention and emotional resilience. All from leaning into, rather than avoiding, discomfort. It’s a practice I’m trying in my own life, although, admittedly, failing at regularly. But when I do, I remind myself that imperfection is part of the complicated human experience that we must hold on to at all costs.