One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt. It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar. You’ve always been a liar. All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral. Another message that she sent her aunt after running it through a chatbot read, “I respect you and I expect the same in return. I want to have a mature conversation.” The aunt appreciated it, Franky said—she called her and sounded calm.
Franky is among a number of people—we’ll never truly know how many, will we?—who secretly use AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude when they interact with difficult family members. I interviewed several of them. Mostly, my interviewees use AI to communicate with individuals they don’t want an emotionally close relationship with—an ex they co-parent with, for example, or an in-law—but whom they nevertheless can’t escape. (Because they are describing tense personal relations, most of my interviewees requested not to be identified by their full name.)
People use AI to both interpret messages they receive and help them write their own to send. If they have to, say, call out rude behavior or express disagreement about whether the kids need a certain type of therapy, they type what they really want to say into one of these programs, ask the AI to nice it up a little, and paste the resulting verbiage into their text messages. Outsourcing correspondence to AI has enabled them to maintain harmony without spending too much time thinking about how to draft a perfect response. As Franky put it, using AI lets her have a relationship without allowing it to “live rent-free in my brain.” Franky said that in her family, it’s important for people “all to have, I don’t know, peace.” She and others have found that they can improve their relationships and at least increase the probability of peace by removing emotion from conversations. And that’s where AI truly excels.
[Read: There’s a name for the people who drain you]
Another woman I spoke with told me about how Claude had helped her revise a text to a family member who often misinterprets her words. This person, she said, sent her a message implying that he wanted her out of his life. Her impulse was to reply, “Congratulations. You got your wish,” but Claude softened that statement because it could “read as sarcasm/implication.” Then it asked, “Want it warmer, blunter, or shorter still?” Claude, she added, “leaves out the emotional part” and makes it more likely that the recipient will hear her and work toward a resolution.
People reach for Cyrano de Anthropic because during difficult text-based conversations, “it’s hard to know what to say,” Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and the author, most recently, of The Balancing Act, told me. When we’re interacting in person, mechanisms in the brain help us interpret peoples’ body language and facial expressions, Matthew Fishleder, a therapist in Maryland, told me. But text and email strip messages of that context. “We’re left trying to decipher, What does this text from my mom mean?” he said. “And how in the world do I respond to something like this?”
In tense situations, people generally know what they’d like to express, Tawwab said, but then they might think, “I can’t say that.” AI can phrase the message in a slightly gentler way—and it can offer the sender “less of a responsibility” for how the recipient reacts. If your mom gets mad about your AI-assisted message, you can always mentally blame Dario Amodei.
The most common use case I encountered for deploying AI in this way was to correspond calmly with an ex-spouse, whom one may now resent with the fire of a thousand billable lawyer hours but whom one must treat cordially, lest one gets threatened with changes to the custody agreement. (As one Florida woman who uses AI for this purpose told me, sending an “F you” text to your ex might feel amazing, but you have to think about the “legal ramifications.”) A father in Arizona told ChatGPT to use a “five-star-hotel-clerk tone” with his ex, and it did—to the point that, reading over his shoulder, his child was shocked by how nice their parents were being to each other. A woman who asked to go by the initial S. told me that she uses AI to negotiate co-parenting decisions with her ex-partner. When AI helps her write “in a very neutral tone so that it’s not inflaming,” she said, “we help our kids to the best degree possible.” She told me that the tool has improved her relationship with her ex-partner, and that she even sometimes recommends the same strategy to her clients in her work as a therapist.
If their exes figure out that they’re using AI, many of the people I spoke with don’t really care. S. thinks her ex may be using it too, because sometimes she’ll notice that “that’s a tone I don’t hear very often from him,” she said. The Florida woman said that her ex has accused her of using AI “many times” but that she’s not especially concerned about impressing him. “It’s like, Oh, I know. I’m terrible in every way, including that I use AI,” she said. “Add it to the list. We get it.’”
The people I spoke with had a range of other reasons for using AI. Several of my interviewees are not native English speakers, and they feel that they are frequently misunderstood when they use their own words. “Even when I do try my absolute best, it just doesn’t work,” the Arizona father told me. One of the people he has used AI to communicate with is an abusive parent; given his childhood environment, he said, he doesn’t have much experience being spoken to amiably and calmly.
Others don’t have much experience with writing, period: A woman named Ashleigh told me that she uses ChatGPT to communicate with her baby’s father’s family because she’s “not a writer at all.” She said that she types in what she wants to say, then prompts the system to “take some of the emotion out and put more of the facts in it.” “It’s great for hard conversations,” she added, “that you know you’re gonna blow up on.” Finally, many of my interviewees like how much time AI saves them. They don’t want to spend their one wild and precious life drafting heartfelt texts to their weird cousin; they want to outsource all of that to Claude. As Franky put it to me, in one of the most relatable quotes I have ever gathered, “I just don’t have time in general to do anything.”
[Read: Forgive the bad texters]
Using a robot to talk with humans has downsides, of course, even if only philosophical ones. Relying on AI for communication can mean that we are “outsourcing our inner power to a machine,” Tawwab said. The people I spoke with are well aware of that. Even though she uses it herself, S. said that her therapy clients can become overly dependent on AI, to the point where they “aren’t thinking for themselves as much.” But as far as mortal sins go, this practice seems to fall somewhere around ordering from Amazon Prime or eating at McDonalds—you may have misgivings, but the convenience truly can’t be beat.
Fishleder, the Maryland therapist, said that although AI can be helpful in a pinch, it won’t resolve the larger relationship dynamics at issue—and it’s further evidence of what he characterized as the “movement away from relying on one another as humans.” Still, when I asked him whether he also sometimes uses AI to write tricky messages, he said, “100 percent.” Sometimes you just need to send a firm but polite text about Thanksgiving plans. It’s not cheating; it’s muddling through.