Unexpected Users of AI in Dating
While ChatGPT might assist some kids in certain situations, teens of all genders require a more reliable support system—one that does not depend on an electricity-guzzling data center to answer a question. It’s not necessarily the guys you might expect, Apollo Knapp told me. These are 6-foot-tall high-school athletes, guys who are social and popular. They’re the type of people that are friends with everybody, who get dapped up in the hallway every two feet, said Knapp, an 18-year-old high school senior in Ohio and a board member at sexual violence prevention nonprofit SafeBAE.
But at his school, these are the guys using AI to help them talk to girls. They’ll paste their texts into ChatGPT for feedback before sending, he said. Or, they’ll send their own photos to ChatGPT and ask, “am I cute?” Or, they’ll simply ask for moral support when they’re “too scared, maybe, to confront women.”
Girls and non-binary teens don’t need to lean on ChatGPT as much; they’re more likely to have a circle of friends ready and willing to workshop their texts. But guys are more isolated, socialized to believe it’s weak to talk about their feelings. Worse, they’ve grown up on a steady diet of media telling them that “if you say the wrong thing” to a girl, “she’s going to accuse you of something.” Even if those messages aren’t accurate, they get inside teen boys’ heads, making them feel like they have to screen everything through ChatGPT to make sure it’s okay.
Broader Trends in Boys' Isolation
The drift of boys and young men away from everyone else in American society has been an enduring theme of the last few years. The fear is that guys, especially straight guys, are getting sucked into manosphere podcasts and becoming more and more alienated from the girls and women they, in theory, want to date. This is an oversimplified narrative, and there’s reason to hope that boys and men are more connected, and more interested in connection, than their most unpleasant listening material might suggest.
But in talking to teens and experts about AI and relationships, I did get the sense that boys need better outlets for their feelings than we’re giving them. After all, Knapp said, “what’s going to happen if you don’t have power, and you have a girlfriend?”
Prevalence and Anecdotal Evidence
Teens are using AI for dating. The question is how. It’s hard to know exactly how many young people are talking to ChatGPT about relationship problems, since research on youth and AI is in its infancy. In one recent Pew survey, 57 percent of teens said they had used AI “to search for information,” while 12 percent said they’d used the tools “to get emotional support or advice.” It’s possible to imagine dating inquiries falling in either category.
Anecdotally, experts and teens alike say young people are turning to ChatGPT with everything from low-stakes questions about texting to serious concerns about what might constitute sexual assault. Val Odiembo, 19, mentors their fellow college students about healthy relationships. As a peer educator, they’re used to getting questions like, “what do I do when my girlfriend says this?” or “is this consent?” But recently, those questions have been tapering off. Odiembo, a nursing student and SafeBAE board member, thinks students are now asking ChatGPT, instead.
I’ve had my students say to me, ‘I asked Chat what I should say to this boy.’ When that happens, “I die a little bit inside.”
Risks of Chatbot Experimentation
Some young people are using chatbots “to test out being flirty or being romantic or being a little bit sexy and seeing how the chatbot responds to that,” Megan Moreno, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin Madison who studies technology and adolescent health, told me. That kind of experimentation may be more common among boys, who generally engage in more risky behavior online than girls, Moreno said.
Using technology to experiment with flirting and romance isn’t new. Millennial teens turned to chat rooms and AOL Instant Messenger for this purpose. This could be risky—or outright dangerous if teens ended up chatting with adults. But, as Moreno points out, at least the people you were chatting with online were real humans who could tell you to go away if you said something too gross.
Chatbots, by contrast, “are programmed to be incredibly receptive and sycophantic,” Moreno said. “Even if you say something incredibly inappropriate, the chatbot is going to respond in a way that reinforces that.” That’s even more problematic when the subject is sexual violence. Young people are increasingly turning to chatbots after sexual encounters to ask if they might have committed assault, Drew Davis, director of strategic initiatives at SafeBAE, told me.
The goal is “giving them language, giving them tools to be able to do this, that’s not coming from AI. It’s connecting them with other people.”
Why Teens Turn to AI and the Path Forward
It’s possible to imagine AI pushing young people even farther apart from one another than they already are. The big question is whether kids are using AI to practice having human relationships or to replace those relationships, Moreno said. It’s not hard to see why teenagers (or adults, for that matter) might be drawn to a voice that always has answers but never criticizes.
When talking about thorny issues like sex and consent, “I think there’s a lot of shame,” Odiembo said. Teens “feel comfortable going to AI, because AI won’t judge them.” But some teens also see value in the inevitable challenge and friction of human relationships. “You need to be called out occasionally,” Knapp, the Ohio senior, said. “That’s how humans evolve.”
The young people I spoke with for this story don’t want better chatbots; they want to see humans get better, instead. They want teachers who are better-trained to discuss difficult issues like consent and assault. They want coaches and other adults who can model healthy masculinity for boys, rather than reinforcing stereotypes. And for all teens, they want supportive places to open up about feelings and relationships, some of the messiest and most important aspects of human life.
I wish people were a little more comfortable having uncomfortable conversations.
