You finally started an online conversation with a stranger you find attractive, yet you don’t really know what to say. They seem happy to talk, but you struggle to find the correct responses. You worry that their patience is growing thin. You pray for some guidance. Luckily, the solution could be just a few clicks away.
After all, you have the power of AI at your fingertips. Why not use it to come up with something fun and interesting to say?
Yet many of us might hesitate in this scenario. Researchers have already warned of “cognitive debt” – students can use AI to write excellent assignments, but then fail miserably in final exams because they remember nothing. No one would want to show up to a date unable to recall anything they had copied and pasted into an online conversation.
Flirting online, like many other emotionally loaded tasks such as writing an apology, a eulogy or a message of congratulations, reflects how you feel about the person. The philosopher Talbot Brewer wrote that a person’s efforts to make sense of their emotions through articulating them can reveal what they value.
For example, suppose someone thought she didn’t especially care about her work. But then she found herself feeling pride when she was promoted. Her emotion may reveal to her that she does in fact care about workplace success.
How your emotions reveal yourself to you
In our recent research, we contend that using AI to flirt – or for any other task where personal connection is valuable – risks bypassing those moments where emotions can reveal important self-knowledge.
Perhaps in flirting online, a person may not read what their date says carefully. Instead, they might quickly copy the text into ChatGPT and then equally quickly paste the response back into the chat.
Alternatively, perhaps an AI wingman is already integrated into the dating app, allowing people to simply click and send the suggested text. They don’t pay attention to what the date says, maybe overlooking potential deal-breakers, things that might be odd, or small stylistic details that would otherwise give them some pause.
By outsourcing this emotional task to ChatGPT, it’s possible for a person to deprive themselves of the opportunity to really let the moments affect them. They could miss the chance to properly consider whether they would be happy to make compromises for their date. They may not even know whether they are genuinely excited about the date.
Instead of slowly articulating their feelings and, in so doing, working out what they value in a relationship, they are authorising AI to say whatever might impress their date.
There’s also the issue of privacy – the flirty exchanges could find their way into training data. And is the AI wingman even trustworthy? It could misrepresent the person using it – and the other party might feel they’d suffered a deception. Even before AI, researchers have questioned whether lying on dating platforms invalidates consent.
At the end of the day, it just feels a bit disrespectful. The output of AI has little to do with how someone feels about their date, but draws more from the training data. This data has nothing to do with the person or their date.
But maybe some people are less careless. Plenty of daters would make sure to scrutinise the AI output before sending it.
Yet humans have a tendency to overly trust AI. Another study found that when people regularly let AI produce their first draft, they tend to accept the output uncritically. The study also found that people can easily adopt the biases of large language models (LLMs), even if they know those biases exist.
From our own study, one worry that emerged was that instead of being true to their own feelings, over-reliance on AI may give the LLMs too much say in shaping what a person values.
We are not suggesting that people should never outsource emotional tasks to AI. Sometimes, there’s no other option but to interact with emotionally manipulative or difficult people – perhaps a relative or an ex-partner. If you are already certain about your feelings towards this person, it may be better to refuse to let them get to you. AI may provide some breathing space.
But if, as humans, we want to get to know other people, have or repair meaningful relationships, or make sure that what we communicate truly reflects how we feel, we should consider resisting the temptation to outsource our emotions to AI. After all, our emotions have the power to reveal to us what we deeply value.
- is a Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Stirling
- is an Assistant Professor, School of Humanities and Digital Sciences, Tilburg University
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
