A.I. Will Affect Your Social Life. Yes, Yours. (Alice Lassman, 8/10/26, NY Times)
Despite speaking to chatbots every day, most of them also maintained full social lives, and in many ways A.I. enriched them. Several interviewees told me that it helped them think about their relationships more clearly and deliberately. But it also began to form the scaffolding of their consequential decision making: encouraging breakups, de-escalating arguments that the chatbot had decided weren’t worth their time. “If I’m more rational and less emotional, I’m doing good,” Lavish Daksh, a 21-year-old in Germany, told me. A.I. had allowed him to make more clearheaded decisions, he said. But he described wanting to strip emotion from his relationships entirely.