If You Ask A.I. for Marriage Advice, It'll Probably Tell You to Get Divorced

A massive cultural shift may be coming.

How to watch a massive cultural shift as it happens: A story in two parts.

Part I:

A user on the online forum Reddit used data analysis tools to study the kinds of comments people leave for people asking relationship advice. The results are both alarming and unsurprising.

First, notice that the red line, which represents comments encouraging users to “end the relationship,” has been the by far the most likely feedback for at least the last 15 years. As far back as 2010, a comment on Reddit’s relationship advice forum was 10% more likely to suggest ending the relationship than it was to suggest “communicating.” Users suggested ending the relationship about 4x more often than they suggested compromise.

Reddit’s reputation in this regard is not a secret. There are entire personal essays out there about the swiftness with which Reddit users will urge questioners to blow their relationships up. In 2022, the lifestyle blog Refinery 21 published an article titled “The Interent Said ‘Dump Him…’ So I Did.” Most of the stories covered in that article cover things like cheating or abuse—the kind of behavior most people would likely urge someone to walk away from.

But Reddit’s relationship advice sections often fail to distinguish between things like that and other conflicts. For example, when one user recently complained about her boyfriend’s self-pity after her medical procedure, the comments blew up. A sample of the top rated replies:

• “He is so beyond pathetic here”

• “Has he always been stupid or is this new behavior?”

• “This guy is a self centered dirtbag. What an AH to not even care about you and your recovery. It was only what could you do for him. That’s so gross. Dump this [expletive].”

• “He will never be there for you. A huge red flag.”

Reddit’s relationship advice forum prioritizes simplistic answers that emotionally validate the user. There’s often no sense on Reddit that relationships are worth fighting for, possibly even worth enduring some pain for. If the significant other is not meeting your expectations, your best bet is to end things right there.

That has always been true of Reddit. But look at the data chart again. Since 2010 in general, and since 2020 in particular, the percentage of “end the relationship” comments has skyrocketed. And the percentage of comments encouraging communication or compromise has fallen significantly. If you ask Reddit’s relationship advice forum what you should do today, you are, statistically anyway, about 3x more likely to be told to end the relationship as you will be told to communicate.

In my book Digital Liturgies, I explain how the logic of Internet life makes these kinds of relational blow-ups seem more plausible. Digital habitats are immediately responsive to our wishes. We can delete, mute, block, and un-friend at will. As more and more of our lives are mediated through digital technology, our emotions become trained to expect this kind of responsiveness everywhere in the world. We feel like something is wrong if another person is allowed to make us uncomfortable and we cannot “exit” the situation. In that way, the Internet lies to us about what real life is like, and develop an inability to live with real people in real relationships—which are often difficult.

I’m convinced that part of the emerging polarization between men and women has to do with the increasingly niche information streams that men and women are immersed in. Men see the excesses and abuses of feminism daily. Women see the excesses and abuses of masculinity daily. Modern men and women are caught in de-sympathetic rhythms of polarized gender discourse. Online male culture and online female culture distrust each other, in part because online life highlights relational tension as a content currency, and also in part because marriage and child-raising, which build empathy between the sexes, are declining. Men and women know less about each other right now, and what they do know is often negative.

Gender War, Technology, and De-Centering the Self

Reddit’s user base reflects this. While it’s true that the kind of cases that would inspire people to write online about them probably skew toward more extreme situations, it’s also true that Reddit’s relationship advice forum is very large, and very active, and covers an immense spread of scenarios. The online dynamics mean this data is not surprising. What is alarming is the acceleration of relationship-ending advice relative to other, more careful pieces of advice. This acceleration matters because…

Part II

…it turns out that AI companies are leaning on Reddit’s content to train their bots. Axios reports that major A.I. bots frequently give answers to user questions that pull from Reddit content. In fact, according to Axios, Reddit is actually the #2 source of content for LLMs (large language model, like ChatGPT or ClaudeAI), behind only YouTube. Here’s a sobering quote included in the Axios report:

At last month’s Tatari conference, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman summed it up with two slides: “Today’s Reddit conversations are tomorrow’s search results” and “No matter how good AI gets, people will always want to hear from other people.”

Practically speaking, this means that users who ask AI bots for counseling or therapy—which is right now a lot of people, and is going to be a lot more people in the future—are going to get a lot of answers pulled from Reddit. In other words, these LLMs are going to spitting out answers to questions like, “Should I get divorced,” by repeating how users on Reddit answer those kinds of question.

And we know how users on Reddit tend to answer those questions!

One of the things worth mentioning about AI counseling is that these bots skew heavily toward validating the user and giving him or her the answer AI thinks they want to hear. There are inherent biases in AI programming that steer it toward sycophancy and a customer-is-always-right ethos.

This is a powerful influence on AI advice or therapy. If a user asks ChatGPT for relationship advice, the AI is already primed to deliver what will satisfy the user most. If ChatGPT is trained on Reddit posts, it will believe (via statistics) that the most likely thing to satisfy the user is to counsel ending the relationship. This won’t be true in every situation, but remember, AIs do not think. They simply repeat input. Any computer that learns about users’ relationships from Reddit posts is going to conclude that ending a relationship is the most preferable option, because that is what Reddit commenters say.

I’m not trying to be overly doom and gloom, nor am I denying that AI bots might counsel something better than divorce or breakup. They can, do, and will. But what seems inarguable at this point is that looking toward the Internet for relationship advice is a good way to get one type of advice over and above anything else. This represents a very serious chance at a massive cultural shift. Technology shapes how we think, and it’s not every day that we get to see behind the curtain as this power is cooked up. But we’re seeing it now.

And here’s where I encourage any pastors, counselors, or youth leaders who may be reading this. AI is going to be a major player when it comes to therapy and counseling. Similar to the way Google has transformed how we look for medical advice, AI is going to play the role of sage for a lot of people. There’s a threat and opportunity here. The threat is that Christians will be sucked into destructive decision making as they consult what they naively believe are objective “data” machines. The opportunity is that AI, like all digital tech, is very unsatisfying. Just as porn doesn’t satisfy intimacy and inboxes don’t solve loneliness, AI will not leave users feeling cared for. That’s something only people made in the image of God can do.