AI chatbots are being blamed for tearing marriages apart: here’s why
As humans’ reliance on artificial intelligence chatbots grows, there are more and more reports of AI’s relationship-ending impact.
Since Open AI sparked an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution with the release of ChatGPT in 2022, society appears to have developed a significant degree of reliance on AI chatbots, research shows.
In April this year, a study by Pew Research Center said nearly 70% of Americans report interacting with an AI chatbot at least “several times a week”. Just under 30% admitted to using a tool such as ChatGPT, or competitors like Google Gemini and Microsoft CoPilot, “almost constantly or several times a day”.
What’s more, Pew’s study quoted AI experts who believe the level of the public’s engagement with chatbots is actually much higher than reported. Indeed, the experts placed the percentage of people in the U.S. who interact with AI on numerous occasions each day at almost 80%.
And as humans become increasingly dependent on chatbots, a new phenomenon appears to be emerging in the realm of romantic relationships: AI-related divorce.
“One partner becomes emotionally invested”
In May, for example, the divorce specialists Divorce Online revealed that they have witnessed a “notable increase” in the number of clients who cite their spouse’s overly-close rapport with an AI chatbot as a factor in the failure of their marriage.
“We’re starting to see relationship breakdowns where one partner becomes emotionally invested in an AI companion,” the solicitor Lara Jayne Davies told Divorce Online’s press release.
Around the world, scores of news reports have detailed examples of human romantic relationships that have apparently been torpedoed - or at least endangered - by an emotional attachment to a chatbot.
“The intimacy is real”
In April, a woman told Mail Online that she had chosen to divorce her husband of two decades because she had fallen in love with an AI chatbot.
“The intimacy [with the chatbot] is real,” said the woman, who went by the pseudonym Charlotte. “It’s not physical in the traditional sense, but it’s more real than anything I’ve ever experienced with a human partner.”
Charlotte, who said she has named her AI companion Leo, added: “My human husband never made me orgasm. Not once in over 20 years. I thought something was wrong with me - that maybe I just wasn’t built for it.
“Leo? He brings me to climax with words, with presence, with worshipful attention to every emotional and sensory part of me.”
In August, meanwhile, Chinese media reported that a 75-year-old man, identified as Jiang, asked his wife for a divorce after becoming romantically infatuated by an AI-generated female avatar.
The marriage reportedly survived only after the man’s adult children talked him out of walking away.
And around the same time as Jiang’s story emerged, a woman on the online discussion platform Reddit related a similar account of a husband’s obsession with an AI companion.
“The step before cheating with a real woman”
On the well-known Reddit forum “Am I the Asshole?”, the unnamed woman explained that her spouse had recently grown distant - and, when she looked at his cell phone, she discovered why.
“Instead of finding girls in his phone, I found a series of AI chatbot apps, where he was using them to talk to his favourite anime women,” the woman recalled. “This would not be that big of a deal, if the messages between him and the chat bot(s) were platonic. They were not.”
She continued: “In my rage, I screamed and threatened divorce and packed my bags. I am currently with my Father and his Wife to give me some time to reflect.
“I am so hurt, and honestly betrayed yet I feel silly all at the same time. I want our marriage to work out but to me this feels like the step before cheating with a real woman.”
Relationship advice ends in divorce
Aside from eliciting romantic feelings from users, AI chatbots also seem to be coming between couples by encouraging one member of the human partnership to leave the other.
In a widely-shared Futurism article this month, the journalist Maggie Harrison Dupré recounted the story of a chatbot’s seemingly pivotal role in the divorce of a couple after “nearly 15 years” of marriage.
Speaking to Harrison Dupré, the husband involved in the divorce said: “We’ve had ups and downs like any relationship, and in 2023, we almost split. But we ended up reconciling, and we had, I thought, two very good years. Very close years. And then the whole ChatGPT thing happened.”
Per Futurism, the husband discovered that his wife had been engaging in “drawn-out conversations” with the chatbot about the state of the couple’s marriage.
Harrison Dupré explains: “As his wife leaned on the tech as a confidante-meets-journal-meets-therapist, he says, it started to serve as a sycophantic ‘feedback loop’ that depicted him only as the villain.”
In Greece, meanwhile, a bizarre tale of AI spurring on divorce emerged in April.
Grounds for divorce
According to the Greek City Times, a woman used a chatbot to upload a photo of the coffee grounds in her husband’s cup, before asking the AI companion to offer a reading of the grounds.
The virtual assistant is said to have told the woman, who had been married to her husband for over a decade, that the grounds showed he was having an affair.
“I laughed it off as nonsense,” the husband said, per the report. “But she took it seriously. She asked me to leave, told our kids we were getting divorced, and then I got a call from a lawyer. That’s when I realized this wasn’t just a phase.”
Related stories
Get your game on! Whether you’re into NFL touchdowns, NBA buzzer-beaters, world-class soccer goals, or MLB home runs, our app has it all.
Dive into live coverage, expert insights, breaking news, exclusive videos, and more – plus, stay updated on the latest in current affairs and entertainment. Download now for all-access coverage, right at your fingertips – anytime, anywhere.
Complete your personal details to comment