Eulogies, breakup texts, Tinder flirting. We asked people to spill about their most intimate uses for AI.
About a year ago, on the first night of a visit to Mexico City, TJ Lind met a guy named Nico. Immediately smitten, he ditched his friends and began a week-long whirlwind romance that continued, long distance, after he returned home to New York.
Seeking to keep the flame lit, Lind looked for help from ChatGPT, which he’d previously used for work.
Lind inputted journal entries so the AI chatbot could learn about their relationship and respond to his questions about how to deal with cultural differences (Nico is a native Colombian; Lind is from Minnesota), how to tell if a fight is serious, and how to delay a planned trip to Europe without causing any hurt feelings.
“It's been the ultimate cultural translator, if that makes sense,” Lind says, “like helping us understand each other.”
Consider it an AI success: Lind and Nico started leasing an apartment in Mexico City a few weeks ago.
Lind is hardly alone in trusting AI for help with his personal life. The Hustle surveyed 380 people about their AI usage, and ~87% said they’d consulted AI for personal matters — for love, therapy, counsel on important life decisions, and much more.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Sometimes they got really personal with the bots. Our respondents asked AI to:
- Write a sexy, rhyming treasure hunt for a significant other’s birthday — a task that took a few seconds instead of several hours.
- Help them examine religious doubts.
- Write a eulogy for an alcoholic ex-husband that would show him in a somewhat positive light because he was the father of her 11-year-old son.
- Take on the persona of Vincent Van Gogh in order to explain to her daughter, upset about an art project in which she drew Sonic the Hedgehog, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. (“What it spit out was some of the most inspiring, touching, and insightful advice I have ever heard.”)
- Write a sonnet to pass onto his wife after his death (he has stage four cancer).
We asked about interactions with AI in three major categories: as a tool for enhancing communication skills to sound funnier or smarter, for therapy, and for romantic purposes. Nearly half of respondents said they’d used it for communication skills, 41% for therapy, and 21% for romance.
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
When it came to using AI to sound wittier or smarter, some respondents used it for language translation skills, like Lind, who was able to have a long conversation with his partner’s Spanish-speaking mother.
Others mixed love and communication together, using AI to punch up messages related to their relationships, whether they were beginning (“To help me follow up after a one-night-stand that I wanted not to be a one-night-stand!”) or coming to an end (“Nothing does a soft letdown text after a bad date as well as AI does.”)
As for therapy, those who sought advice from AI largely came away impressed. Annie Sragner told The Hustle that AI is like having “a pocket therapist, coach, or mentor — whatever I need at that moment.” AI has helped her cope with uncertain feelings about the future and give pep talks when she wants to feel motivated.
“It's not a replacement for a real therapist or a heart-to-heart with a loved one, but there's something comforting about having that kind of dynamic support available instantly, whenever you need it,” Sragner says.
Lorena Brockman still seeks counsel from her mother and sister but finds the relative objectivity of AI refreshing.
“With AI,” Brockman says, “I get no emotional investment and AI isn't going to worry about hurting my feelings or being honest without concern of offensiveness.”
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
Many respondents also liked the fact that AI wouldn’t judge them, no matter how serious or silly their problem was.
One person, who asked to remain anonymous given the personal details of her story, said she was experiencing a pregnancy scare and inputted the chronology of her sex life, menstrual cycle, and symptoms to see if AI could confirm she wasn’t pregnant. The scenario was “too ridiculous to talk to a doctor about it,” she says, and most of her good friends live several time zones away so she couldn’t consult them quickly.
“I just [needed] another perspective to confirm the same thing to be able to 100% believe it,” she says.
The Hustle also asked respondents to rate the trustworthiness of AI on a scale of 1 (completely untrustworthy) to 10 (entirely trustworthy).
The average rating for our 380 respondents was 6.5. People reported being far more likely to trust AI to help them in their professional lives (60% believing it trustworthy) than in their personal lives (42% believing it trustworthy).
Olivia Heller/The Hustle
And few people believed using AI regularly would deteriorate their social skills or professional skills — just 33%.
Lind has so far only seen improvements in his personal life since using AI. As we spoke over Zoom, he was sitting on the communal rooftop of his and Nico’s new apartment in Mexico City. And, to the best of my knowledge, he wasn’t using AI to answer my questions.
