Ms. Guided: Is Ai Coming For My Job? 

Is AI coming for my job? 

At dinner with a friend recently, she mentioned that her roommate uses ChatGPT for dating advice.

“Did you shame her?” I asked. 

But on the walk home—a few martinis in—I imagined a world where I was still dating around and had unparalleled access to a sycophantic chatbot in the palm of my hand. 

AI is weaseling its way into our love lives. Dating apps are rolling out and testing AI tools while AI matchmakers and agentic dating platforms threaten to disrupt the industry. Some people are even falling in love with their chatbots, and research suggests Gen Z has the highest AI adoption rate of any generation—a survey by Match found that 49 percent (!!) of Gen Z respondents are using AI tools to help make their dating lives easier. 

Feeding my deepest darkest thoughts to a bot is a hard no for me—especially against the backdrop of environmental decay and the overwhelming proliferation of AI tools at work, in schools, and in war zones—but I can relate to seeking out validation and guidance while trying to navigate a messy dating environment.

I’ve always had an approval addiction. There was a time when I was dishing out every detail of my dating life to friends. I could hardly get dressed for a first date, reply to a text, or form an opinion about a suitor without consulting a roundtable of girlfriends. Once, I was trying to decide whether to respond to a guy who kept popping in and out of my life (it turned out he wasn’t over his ex). After talking it through with my therapist, she asked a simple question: What do you want to do?

I froze. The only voices I could hear in my head were everyone else’s—mine was barely a whisper. My therapist challenged me to loop in my friends after I made decisions, and it was uncomfortable at first. I went on bad dates, sent embarrassing texts, and slept with people I shouldn’t have. But most of those mistakes I only made once.

In your early 20s, trading dating woes and getting advice from your girlfriends is a rite of passage. But in your early 30s, obsessing over a text from a guy you met once starts to feel pathetic—especially when the friend across the table from you at brunch is married and has a baby at home. So what’s a girl to do?

I talked to some friends who use AI for dating help. Their uses range from innocuous (auditing Hinge profiles or softening a breakup text) to consequential, like deciding whether to continue seeing someone at all. But the value they describe has little to do with the actual advice. It’s about the approval.

One friend, we’ll call her Claudia, is in her late 20s, and mainly uses ChatGPT as a copy editor. Crafting a dating app profile is a pain, she tells me. “You never know if you’re being too deep. Do I want to be funny? But also meaningful? To be honest, I never thought it was as funny as I was, so I didn’t end up using what it gave me.” 

She describes herself as an overthinker who has a hard time organizing her thoughts. She doesn’t ask ChatGPT for advice on what to do, she assures me, just what to say when she’s stuck. 

“I feel like ghosting is wrong. It’s so frustrating to be on the other side, like not knowing what actually happened,” she says. “I want to give context, but some context is mean, and if we’ve only been on a few dates I want to be nice about it.” 

One guy, for example, parties more than she does—a critical lifestyle misalignment that she wants to be honest, but kind, about.

Her process goes something like this: She dumps her unfiltered thoughts into ChatGPT, asks for help turning those thoughts into a text that’s “casual, nice enough, and gives some context.” Then she edits it back and forth with the robot before shooting it off. To help capture her essence, she sometimes sends screenshots of her correspondences so the bot can mimic her tone.

My friend Carolyn, 31, says she’s been asking ChatGPT, or “Chat,” as she calls it, for relationship advice since the app came out in 2023. It started with text drafts. Mostly, she says, the suggestions were cheesy and she wouldn’t use them. “Obviously, I can write a text,” she says. “I’ve just become way too reliant.” 

Eventually, she started feeding the highs and lows of a progressing relationship into the same thread. She tells me about a guy she went on 10 dates with, even though she started to worry about a lack of depth in their conversations as early as the second date. 

“Usually on a second date I get a bit deeper with people, and maybe he’s not matching me where I’m at,” she says. “And Chat would be like: ‘You’re valid for this.’”

She would talk to her friends simultaneously about what she was going through but worried she was annoying them. “We already talked about every single issue I had with him for like 30 minutes so I felt annoying bringing it back up over and over and over. I had an outlet to get it out of my system so I wasn’t dying to talk about it every two minutes with my friend.”

Both Claudia and Carolyn describe AI as a real-time journal that talks back. They dump all of their thoughts, fears, and insecurities without judgment. It doesn’t spit back revelatory information or research-backed advice. It’s simply reiterating their own words and feelings in bullet-point form.

These aren’t women with bad instincts. “I knew in my gut I should end it,” Carolyn says. “I just needed the evidence in front of me.” They’re experiencing something universal: Dating is draining. Friends are moving on to different phases of life. Therapy is expensive and, if you can afford it, typically only a weekly or monthly reprieve. 

“I just kept asking Chat … do you think that I should end it with him?” Carolyn says. “It doesn’t tell you exactly what to do with your life, but it does regurgitate everything I’ve said to it. I just kept rereading that and asking it in different ways and I just needed that to convince myself to end it with this guy. Ever since that situation I just kept using it.”

And that’s the rub: AI is a mirror, not a sounding board. If you’re looking for shared experience, perspective, or tough love, you’re not going to find it with ChatGPT. But for people like Claudia and Carolyn, it can be a useful tool for self-reflection and for affirming their feelings in moments of insecurity and uncertainty. 

Relying on AI for validation is like relying on an Instagram Story “like” to feel hot—it’s an illusory, addictive, and short-lived high. What happens when those couple dates turn into a relationship? Will you pull out your phone to ask Chat how to respond to your boyfriend in the middle of a conflict? Maybe it works in isolation, but if the goal of dating is to eventually bring someone else in the loop, the AI crutch could end up hurting more than it helps.

So, what’s my advice? Buy a journal. Record video diaries after every date you go on. Annoy (and be grateful for) your friends. Shoot me an email. But above all, learn to sit in discomfort. So what if the guy you went on two dates with thinks you’re a bitch because of a curt text? 

And before we go, some advice for the AI haters (myself included). You can silently judge people who refer to ChatGPT as “Chat” (sorry, Carolyn). But what if you’re the friend they feel they can’t rely on? Or are worried you’ll judge their insecurities? Your approval means more to them than you realize—and so does your judgment.