For Hall, finding out how her boyfriend used AI made her question conversations she’d once felt good about. Before meeting in person, they’d spent months messaging. He’d seemed warm over text, she says, but could be colder face-to-face. She’d wondered: “What am I doing wrong?”
His chat history offered a possible explanation. When they’d discussed serious or emotional subjects, she says, he’d pasted her messages into ChatGPT and asked it to help him respond. She remembers his instruction: “Placate her.”
“It’s horrifying,” she says now.
She still wonders whether he would have spoken so harshly about her to another person, or whether something about talking to AI encouraged him. “Would you have said all those things to a person in that way?” she asks.
After she left his house, he began texting her. She turned off her phone. When he later came to her home, she told him she’d read the chats. By then, she says, she felt there was little left to discuss: “I just read exactly how you feel.”