The researchers found that when people use AI for relationship advice, they become 25% more convinced they are 'right' and significantly less likely to apologize or repair the connection.

It's a tool, I can bang my hand on purpose with a hammer, too.

>The way that generative AI tends to be trained, experts told me, is focused on the individual user and the short term. In one-on-one interactions, humans rate the AI’s responses based on what they prefer, and “humans are not immune to flattery,” as Hansen put it. But designing AI around what users find pleasing in a brief interaction ignores the context many people will use it in: an ongoing exchange. Long-term relationships are about more than seeking just momentary pleasure—they require compromise, effort, and, sometimes, telling hard truths. AI also deals with each user in isolation, ignorant of the broader social web that every person is a part of, which makes a friendship with it more individualistic than one with a human who can converse in a group with you and see you interact with others out in the world.

I also thought this bit was interesting, relative to the way that friendship advice from Reddit and elsewhere has been trending towards self-centeredness (discussed elsewhere in this thread):

>Friendship is particularly vulnerable to the alienating force of hyper-individualism. It is the most voluntary relationship, held together primarily by choice rather than by blood or law. So as people have withdrawn from relationships in favor of time alone, friendship has taken the biggest hit. The idea of obligation, of sacrificing your own interests for the sake of a relationship, tends to be less common in friendship than it is among family or between romantic partners. The extreme ways in which some people talk about friendship these days imply that you should ask not what you can do for your friendship, but rather what your friendship can do for you. Creators on TikTok sing the praises of “low maintenance friendships.” Popular advice in articles, on social media, or even from therapists suggests that if a friendship isn’t “serving you” anymore, then you should end it. “A lot of people are like I want friends, but I want them on my terms,” William Chopik, who runs the Close Relationships Lab at Michigan State University, told me. “There is this weird selfishness about some ways that people make friends.”

https://sherryturkle.mit.edu/

She uses the phrase "frictionless relationships" to refer to Ai chat bots and says social media primed us for this.

https://www.youtube.com/live/6C9Gb3rVMTg?t=2127

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/18/g-s1177-78041/what-to-do-when...

Basically will tell you to go outside and touch grass and play pickleball.

I used to use LLMs for alternate perspectives on personal situations, and for insights on my emotions and thoughts.

I had no qualms, since I could easily disregard the obviously sycophantic output, and focus on the useful perspective.

This stopped one day, till I got a really eerie piece of output. I realized I couldn’t tell if the output was actually self affirming, or simply what I wanted to hear.

That moment, seeing something innocuous but somehow still beyond my ability to gauge as helpful or harmful is going to stick me with for a while.