Before we know it, worries about AI-besotted partners are going to seem really dated.
Before we know it, worries about AI-besotted partners are going to seem really dated.
T he New York Times has an Ethicist column, because of course it does. Its readers like to think of themselves as very Ethical. Socrates would have hated Trump, too. A recent Ethicist entry: “My Partner’s Dependence on Chatbots Is Becoming a Problem. How Do I Tell Him?”
Some variant of this appears in every agony-aunt column. In nearly every instance, it’s a female who is watching with alarm as her guy — who, in your mind’s eye, is a pear-shaped man wearing a fedora and a “Han Shot First” T-shirt — turns to AI for entertainment and decision-making. Like this:
Dear Person in the Newspaper Who Has Been Empowered to Offer Advice For Some Reason: My husband of seven years (no human kiddos, three cats) has always been at the forefront of new ideas — he moderates a subreddit about implanting human consciousness into various objects, like cantaloupes or bowling balls — but lately his life seems to have been taken over by a chatbot who gives him advice on reselling Pokemon cards and coordinating anti-ICE memes on Bluesky. He calls it “Judy.” He says her name three times in a Cary Grant accent, and it drives me nuts, so I finally asked the chatbot to name the movie in which Cary Grant actually says that and the answer was “sorry, no, he never did say that,” and ever since, my partner is cold and distant, sleeping on the couch, avoiding eye contact, severing finances, looking at apartment listings, and getting a faraway look as he fingers the sharp edge of a fruit-skin peeler. Was I wrong?
No, you weren’t. The people in the wrong are the ones who don’t notice that they’re alienating their loved ones. At least we know that AI isn’t writing the replies, because this is what a clanker would say:
You’re not wrong — you’re a swallow that takes flight when it smells smoke before the tree catches fire, instead of waiting for the forest to be consumed. It’s not criticism — it’s love, in all the right places. Try bringing up the subject over a meal you both enjoy. Here’s a recipe for pasta amore, a dish from Verona, a city famed for its romantic atmosphere.
Is this new, a sign of our mad age? Eh. In the past, there were men obsessed with getting stock advice from Ouija boards. There were probably a few dolts who stayed up late trying to get bowling tips from a Magic 8 Ball. You suspect that actual AI obsession among wife-ignoring men is not a big thing.
In fact, you suspect that AI obsession in general is not a big thing, that we’re already a bit bored by it. The youth in particular hate it, regarding AI like they would regard a mannequin dressed in women’s clothes that Dad put in the living room, saying “I want you to call her ‘Mom’ from now on.” You suspect that the buzz has become an annoying drone, and we’re six months away from AI becoming a mark of cringe, a byword for the false and ersatz. Oh, it will be incorporated into daily life, but it will always be seen as an organ grinder’s monkey. The most successful integration of AI won’t feel like AI at all — just a smarter, better computer-thing. No one will speak of it any more than anyone speaks of the Information Superhighway, because the hype cooled and the actual technological advances were added incrementally to everything, for better or worse. No one in a year will trouble the Ethicists about AI-besotted partners.
More telling, they won’t ask advice columnists for help with a partner who seems indifferent to AI entirely, neither worried nor besotted. That’s so 2026. You might as well have a headline that says “How microplastics in the vanishing ozone layer affect the war in Ukraine.” Yawn. All the right people are panicking about something else now. Dear Ethicist, my partner is obsessed with the record-breaking El Niño that will cause flooding and famine. How do I tell him a famine might not be so bad because he could frankly stand to lose a few pounds?