ChatGPT Is Not Your Friend (guest post by Grace Helton) (opens in new tab)

Some people have come to interact with ChatGPT as though it were a kind of friend or romantic partner. For instance, a 2025 New York Times article describes the case of Ayrin, a human who fell in love with her ChatGPT “boyfriend.” Ayrin is far from alone. Twenty percent of high school students have used AI romantically or knew someone who had. Several start-ups have developed large language models (LLMs) specifically designed to play the role of a companion. For instance, the San Francisco-ba...