{"id":165041,"date":"2025-09-28T02:13:12","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T02:13:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/165041\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T02:13:12","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T02:13:12","slug":"how-chatbots-are-breaking-up-mar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/165041\/","title":{"rendered":"how chatbots are breaking\u00a0up mar…"},"content":{"rendered":"

My eye was caught by a vivid headline: \u201cChatGPT Is blowing up marriages …\u201d it began. Below it was an intriguing piece<\/a> by \ufeffMaggie Harrison Dupr\u00e9 \ufeffbased on conversations with more than a dozen people who said that AI chatbots played a key role in the dissolution of their long-term relationships and marriages. \u201cNearly\u00a0all of these now-exes,\u201d Dupr\u00e9 writes, \u201care currently locked in divorce proceedings and often bitter custody battles.\u201d She also reviewed AI chat logs, records of conversations between spouses, social media posts, court records and other documentation.<\/p>\n

One of the couples she spoke to had been together for 15 years. \u201cWe\u2019ve had ups and downs like any relationship,\u201d said the husband, \u201cand in 2023 we almost split. But we ended up reconciling, and we had, I thought, two very good years. Very close years.\u201d<\/p>\n

But then \u201cthe whole ChatGPT thing happened\u201d. Old arguments came suddenly \u2013 and aggressively \u2013 roaring back. What he eventually realised was that his wife had started using ChatGPT to analyse him and their marriage, holding \u201clong, drawn-out conversations\u201d over text and the chatbot\u2019s phone-like \u201cvoice mode\u201d feature. \u201cWhat was happening, unbeknownst to me at the time, was she was dredging up all of these things that we had previously worked on, and putting them into ChatGPT,\u201d he said. And as his wife used the tech as a confidante, journal and therapist, it started to serve as a sycophantic \u201cfeedback loop\u201d that depicted him only as the villain. The couple are now going through a divorce.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s lots more where that came from, it seems. This month, \ufeffGeoff Hinton, who won a Nobel prize for his role in developing the technology, said in the<\/a> Financial \ufeffTimes<\/a>\ufeff<\/a> that the chatbot had caused a break\ufeffup with his partner of several years. \u201cShe got ChatGPT to tell me what a rat I was,\u201d he said, admitting the move surprised him. \u201cShe got the chatbot to explain how awful my behaviour was and gave it to me. I didn\u2019t think I had been a rat, so it didn\u2019t make me feel too bad.\u201d \u2009<\/p>\n

What all this brings to mind is Amara\u2019s \ufefflaw<\/a>\ufeff, named after the \ufeffAmerican researcher Roy Amara, \ufeffwho first articulated it: \u201cWe tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.\u201d So it is with AI. We spent the first two years of ChatGPT panicking over students using it to write essays. Now it\u2019s figuring in divorce proceedings and interfering in the personal lives of Nobel laureates. And who knows where it\u2019ll go next?<\/p>\n

How did we get here? I can think of two reasons. The first is that we didn\u2019t appreciate the enduring power of the Eliza syndrome: the gullibility of humans when they encounter a machine that apparently can talk back to them. The name comes from a famous experiment<\/a> \ufeffconducted by the \ufeffMIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in the 1960s.\ufeff<\/p>\n

He wrote a program for parsing written language that ran on MIT\u2019s new time-sharing system. A student could type in a sentence and the program, which had been coded with simple grammatical rules, would transform the sentence into a new sentence that had the appearance of being a response to the original, and display it on the screen, giving the student the illusion that \ufeffthey were conversing with the machine.<\/p>\n

What Weizenbaum had built was the first chatbot. He called \ufeffit Eliza, after Eliza \ufeffDoolittle, the heroine of George Bernard Shaw\u2019s play Pygmalion.\ufeff It was a minor sensation on the MIT campus for a time, but the full import of what he had created only dawned on Weizenbaum when, one day, his secretary asked him to leave the room while she was interacting with the program. It was as if she needed privacy to talk to her therapist.<\/p>\n

But if Eliza \u2013 an exceedingly \ufeff simple, deterministic piece of software \u2013 could have that kind of impact, imagine what the attraction would be of something as sophisticated as ChatGPT. And what people would use it for. Initially, of course, for cheating at assignments; but also as a free therapist that has been trained to be sympathetic and sycophantic<\/a>\ufeff \u2013 and lead people down their own self-indulgent rabbit\ufeff holes.<\/p>\n

The other reason why chatbots are heading into strange territory has to do with the commercial imperatives of the tech companies that dominate the AI space. The industry has realised that the real power of chatbots goes far beyond natural language, in that they make visible subtle psychological, social and political contexts that for millennia were the sole domain of humans. As \ufeffDaniel Barcay<\/a>\ufeff \ufeffputs it\ufeff: \u201cSuddenly, a text box can sense and respond to our tone, recognise subtle implications in our word choices, infer our emotional state, identify our personality quirks and detect interpersonal frictions.\u201d<\/p>\n

You can see where this is heading. For an industry that is \u2013 still \u2013 based on targeted advertising, the window into the human soul offered by chatbots is much, much more high-resolution and insightful than what can be gleaned from mere clickstreams and YouTube \u201cengagement\u201d. Think of it as the difference between smoke signals and broadband. In due course it will, of course, be monetised. And then we\u2019ll find out\u00a0what this AI stuff is really for.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m reading<\/p>\n

The Blank Page Revolution<\/a> is a really nice essay by\ufeff Steven Johnson \ufeffabout the history of notebooks \u2013 a subject so dear to his heart that he led the project at Google that created the online tool NotebookLM.<\/p>\n

A fabulous piece of on-site anthropology by \ufeffJasmine Sun\ufeff is Are You High-Agency or an NPC?<\/a>, revealing how Silicon Valley\u2019s AI boom has created a new social\u00a0hierarchy.<\/p>\n

The Sledgehammer & the Gavel<\/a> is\ufeff economist Brad DeLong\u2019s review of Breakneck, Dan Wang\u2019s \ufeffimportant new book on China and the US.<\/p>\n

Photograph by\u00a0Ramsey Cardy\/Sportsfile for Collision via Getty Images<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"My eye was caught by a vivid headline: \u201cChatGPT Is blowing up marriages …\u201d it began. Below it…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165042,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-165041","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165041\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}