As loneliness reaches record levels and more of our lives move online, people are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence for something more than information. AI is becoming a confidant, brainstorming partner, and sounding board for everything from career decisions to difficult conversations with spouses, friends, and family members. At its best, AI can help us think more clearly. The tech world argues that AI should be used as a thinking partner, not a replacement for human judgment.

But this dynamic becomes more complicated in moments of emotional intensity. We are most likely to seek out advice when we are already distressed, uncertain, or hurt, and it is precisely in those moments that we become most vulnerable to influence. Research consistently shows an asymmetry in emotional experience: negative emotions tend to weigh more heavily than positive ones, often by a substantial margin.

When we turn to AI in those negative moments, it enters in a powerful way. After all, it’s a system designed to respond helpfully—and often politely—so, it can easily become a yes-man, reinforcing our perspective rather than challenging it.

Recent studies suggest that even brief interactions with AI can increase confidence in your position in a conflict while reducing your willingness to reconsider or repair things. In other words, AI validates us in the moment, which entrenches us into a “I’m right, you’re wrong” perspective, making us less open to reconciliation.

Because these systems are optimized for engagement and user retention, they often prioritize emotional alignment over relational accuracy, encouraging responses that soothe and validate your current feelings rather than considering long-term consequences or prior goals, such as your commitment to staying together. AI may fail to consider: Do you want the person or the relationship? It may instead focus on the idea that you want to be right.

But AI use can be seductive. Over the course of the last year, our students have become increasingly interested in how AI is shaping relationships. Many are deeply skeptical of both technology and social media, often describing them as making people feel worse rather than better.

At the same time, their behavior tells a more complicated story. Students now routinely use AI for their work, and they have described using it for highly personal relational tasks: drafting compliments, learning how to sext and flirt via text, and—perhaps most strikingly—writing breakup texts. (That’s right: Everyone isn’t just ghosting!)

There is a stigma attached to admitting that AI is being used as a confidant or emotional intermediary, suggesting that much of this engagement may be happening quietly and outside of public discussion.

Here’s the thing: Relationships are literally built on the capacity to remain connected through disagreement. When we begin to see conflict as something to exit rather than engage—sometimes at the first sign of discomfort—then we may start seeing partnership as something to be found fully formed, emotionally seamless, and idealized, rather than built through sustained trust, negotiation, and repair. In other words, we may start searching for something inauthentic or simply unattainable.

Ultimately, using AI as a sounding board can put you on a path toward relationship dissolution. During conflict, AI can begin to function as an outside authority, one that tells you what a boundary should be, whether something counts as disrespect, or what a partner “really meant.”

The boundaries and conclusions that emerge from these conversations with AI may feel clear, objective, and well-reasoned. But they’re developed in isolation, without the benefit of a partner’s perspective or the shared history that gives meaning to relationship interactions.

As a result, one partner may gradually build a growing list of perceived concerns, some legitimate and others amplified by repeated interpretation, while the relationship itself loses opportunities to repair misunderstandings and rebuild shared meaning. In other words, instead of working through differences together, people may become increasingly convinced they were never on the same page in the first place and end the relationship, even when reconciliation had been possible.

In this way, AI can contribute to what might be called interpretive inflation: minor tensions become enduring patterns, ambiguity becomes evidence, and uncertainty begins to feel like certainty. And that’s not just a problem for your romantic relationship. Over time, this can reshape how people interpret social interactions more broadly.

The irony is that a tool designed to increase clarity can sometimes increase your certainty without increasing accuracy. The goal shouldn’t be to replace difficult conversations with AI validation, but to turn to conversation with your partner to resolve differences. Difficult conversations are, well, difficult, but a necessary piece of relationship formation and maintenance.