She asked ChatGPT for relationship advice. The response: Dump him.

Katie Moran was feeling a lot of anxiety around her relationship. For months, it had felt like she was putting in so much more effort than her partner. So she turned to ChatGPT.

“I was trying to like, not push him away,” she tells Yahoo. “So I was chatting with Chat, trying to figure out coping mechanisms and like, how can I be better? Or you know, how can I manage my anxiety? And that's when Chat was kind of like, Well, it takes two people to be in a relationship. Are you sure you want to be with someone if it impacts your well-being?”

And so she broke up with the guy. “It’s not because Chat did not like him as a person; it’s because Chat did not like the way he treated me,” she said in a TikTok that now has over 218,000 views.

As artificial intelligence tools have seeped further into everything from education to personal finance, they’ve also begun to play a role in our dating lives. Just as singles are figuring out that they can use the technology as a sort of wingman to help them flirt with each other, many of them — like Moran — are also leaning on it to break things off when things go south.

It’s not like Moran didn’t have any flesh-and-blood person to talk to about her romantic situation. But the more she talked to her family and friends, the more she felt people getting exhausted of her bringing it up. After a while, she felt that she’d burned out all of her socially acceptable opportunities to parse out the relationship.

“It was sort of like an Oh, I don't wanna bother them anymore about it kind of thing,” she says. “People would be like, ‘I already told you what to do.’ It wasn't dismissive, necessarily.” Moran says her friends would change the conversation topic when she brought up her love life. One person hung up on her.

So she turned to ChatGPT, where she felt like she could really get into all her thoughts. “ Chat isn’t actually judging you — there’s a patience that if you say the same thing over and over again, Chat will still respond,” she says. “It doesn’t have human emotions where they’re like, ‘Why didn’t you listen to me?’”

Emily, who asked to remain anonymous for the sake of her ex’s privacy, also relied on ChatGPT when she began feeling insecure in her last relationship. It slowly became an emotional crutch for her, she tells Yahoo. She would consult ChatGPT to analyze the things he did, even after they broke up.

“[ChatGPT] was keeping me grounded,” Emily says. “But, you know, I didn’t want to accept some of what it was saying, so I would go back and forth a lot.”

Eventually, suspicion won out for Emily, and she used AI to draft a breakup text. Her then boyfriend asked to talk to her about it, and she agreed. But a few hours later, he sent her another text telling her that he didn’t want to talk anymore. It sounded very different from his usual messaging syntax, and was filled with em dashes (a supposed ChatGPT giveaway) that he normally didn’t use. Emily felt right away that the breakup text must have been AI-generated.

Relational psychoanalyst Cynthia LaForte tells Yahoo that this phenomenon of turning to AI tools like Snapchat AI or ChatGPT for dating advice is only becoming more common, and often for understandable reasons.

“[AI tools] will really take in the nuances and the details of what is happening and give you perspective, make you think about things, give you language to maybe what it is that you're feeling,” LaForte explains. “That is at least my perspective on therapy. Therapy is about putting … words to things that are maybe hard to describe and hard to communicate — but you are doing that with another human being, as opposed to an AI tool.”

Micahela Kyla’s most recent relationship lasted about eight months, and she’s used ChatGPT to help process a lot of the big emotions that arose in the aftermath. It’s one of the longer relationships the 23-year-old has been in; her romances usually end after about a month. “I’m an overthinker and tend to spiral on my thoughts, [like] my partner would leave me like everyone else,” she tells Yahoo.

Kyla hasn’t really relied on AI for any emotional support in the past, unsure of how helpful it could actually be. But in the throes of her latest separation, she saw a TikTok from @Elixirshotz about using ChatGPT to heal from a breakup (complete with suggested prompts) and decided to try it for herself.

“Since my friends cannot really help me with my situation, I tried using it. [I] gave [ChatGPT] all the context of my personality, the whole duration of my relationship with him and our past relationships — and surprisingly, it works,” she says. “It broke down what [our] attachment style is, what could have triggered both of us and what I can do to move on healthily.”

Kyla didn’t expect how grounded the advice from ChatGPT would be, especially since she didn’t agree with the advice she was getting from her friends. “We have different experiences in our relationships, so when I did try asking them for help, they were just telling me to go back to him and just beg him to talk to me, but I wanted a realistic and boundary-driven approach,” she says. “Since my ex is used to his exes going back and begging, I want to break that cycle. So I asked ChatGPT.”

The emotions associated with dating, LaForte notes, are often complicated, deep and painful, commonly evoking embarrassment or guilt in divulging these often-private feelings. “In some ways that's good — getting someone to discuss feelings, disclose feelings, feel feelings, be reflective, have perspective,” she says. “But … there is something about saying out loud a shameful, traumatic, painful thing to another human being that in and of itself is often very therapeutic.”

And that’s something, she points out, we can’t get from ChatGPT. Those vulnerable social moments allow us to know that other human beings have been through similar experiences or can put our actions in perspective, helping us realize that things aren’t as bad as we think they are. They remind us that even when we make mistakes, we are still worthy as humans who live unique lives.

“You can't relate to AI and AI cannot relate to you,” LaForte says. “Yes, they have a lot of knowledge and they know a lot of things, but AI isn't, you know, walking down the streets of New York City. AI doesn't know what it's like to have a parent get sick and die. Only human beings can experience how we relate.”

Ultimately, it’s still people who are making the calls for what’s happening in their relationships. Moran and her ex ended up getting back together. But just when it seemed like they were talking everything out and moving onto a fresh chapter together, they got into a fight fueled by all the press interviews Moran was doing about their previous breakup. He talked to ChatGPT about what to do, and it told him to break up with her. So he did.

“This is probably the most important thing [to do] when you use AI,” a now-single (and stung) Moran says of the move. “Like, have critical reasoning skills. He looked at Chat’s output and didn't decide for himself.”