Despite ChatGPT's well-documented issues, people are using it to advise them on relationship issues — and it's going about as well as you'd expect.
In a new editorial, Vice advice columnist Sammi Caramela said she had been blissfully unaware of the ChatGPT-as-therapist trend until someone wrote into her work email about it earlier this year.
Back in February, an unnamed man told the writer that his girlfriend refused to stop using the chatbot for dating advice and would even bring up things it had told her in arguments. Though Caramela was so shocked that she "nearly choked" on her coffee, the advice-seeker wasn't all that perturbed — and claimed that he found his girlfriend's ChatGPT use fascinating.
"I was a bit floored by this confession. I had no idea people were actually turning to AI for advice, much less input on their relationships," the columnist wrote in her more recent piece. "However, the more I explored the topic, the more I realized how common it was to seek help from AI — especially in an era where therapy is an expensive luxury."
Intrigued, Caramela found a friend who used the OpenAI chatbot for similar purposes, running relationship issues by it as a "non-biased" sounding board. Eventually, that person realized that ChatGPT wasn't unbiased at all, but rather "seemed to heavily validate her experience, perhaps dangerously so."
Similar questions have been posed on the r/ChatGPT subreddit, and as Caramela explained, the consensus over there suggested not only