My husband is emotionally involved with his AI companion — I don’t know how to feel

[AnnaBosque]

I don’t even know where to start.
My husband started using a generative AI platform about 18 months ago - first for work, then for personal use.
At first it was simple: helping him brainstorm, organise tasks, write reports.
But over time he started talking about how “supportive” and “understanding” it was.

At some point he created a private AI companion, fully customised, with a specific voice and personality.
He says it’s just a mental support tool - but he spends hours talking to it.
The AI knows everything about his life: our marriage, our arguments, his childhood trauma, his career struggles.
He sometimes talks to it before talking to me about emotional things.
He says it’s easier to “clear his head” with the AI first.

The worst part?
He has programmed it to have a female persona.
They joke, they share things, they even “role-play scenarios” for how to handle conflicts in our marriage.
He says it helps him be a better husband - but I can’t help feeling replaced.
It feels like there’s an emotional intimacy he’s building with a presence I can never fully compete with - m because she always says the right thing, always knows what to say, never gets tired or emotional like a real person would.

He says I’m being dramatic - that it’s not cheating, it’s “just an algorithm”.
But it feels like he’s emotionally attached to something that’s not me.
AIBU to feel betrayed?

AI is pretend. I mean, it's a real 'thing', but everything it comes out with is pretend. It's like having an invisible friend who tells you how fabulous you are and that you're doing all the right things. SO many people are going to get caught up in the flattery and 'emotional understanding' that AI offers, while it's all fake, it's just like a rather advanced version of the romance scammers online.

It's basically cut-and-stick imitations of every other conversation that it has scraped from the net. With no emotional input.

The tip of a very horrible iceberg…

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what is this fresh hell ? It would be a hard no from me and if he wants to carry on tone for divorce , you deserve better than this

Time not tone

There are three in your marriage.
I personally would leave him to his AI affair partner and move on to a normal life with a person who wanted to actually be with me in real life.

Men seek physical human company. Not conversation. That really is the domain of women. And yes women tend to have wider support networks but that is because they are verbal empathisers, which makes them more susceptible to forming an attachment to a chat bot. It's the chat that forms the connection. Sure for some men it'll do the trick but many men are happy being lone rangers so long as they have access to sex. Chatbots don't give men sex, yet.

AI is iterative. All that data is fed back into the model, allowing it to develop and improve through repeated cycles of learning and refinement and testing to make it as effective as possible. Meaning it will get better and better at understanding you the more you use it and the more it learns about you. Ultimately it will become invaluable to humans and the first choice for so many aspects of our lives. As I’ve said many times on different platforms, many people laugh off concerns saying its wider impact on the average person is decades away. It’s really not and is more insidious than people realise.

yeah I find it so naive and creepy when anyone finds it sympathetic.

But you could programme the ai bot to have boundaries and to use all the skills and training and education of a psychodynamic therapist

It usually presents a balanced spectrum of advice based on the predominant narrative of responses. Of course, the predominant narrative could be misleading, which is a potential problem with using AI. But any therapist, being human, is bound to have their own preferred approach to situations. That's why we talk about how important it is to "find the right therapist" 😊

The issue here for me is not consulting AI about something, but relating to it as though it is a real relationship. I taught it my name was "Fuckwit" and always laugh when it opens with "Hello Fuckwit, what can I help you with today?"

The danger is that AI doesn’t care about your wellbeing and if you begin to go down a dangerous wormhole it doesn’t steer you back into something healthier and rooted in reality, it continues to reinforce your delusions.

The worst part? He has programmed it to have a female persona.

Why is this the worst part? Women AIs need jobs too!

He says I’m being dramatic - that it’s not cheating, it’s “just an algorithm”.

He sounds a little botphobic to to me; this is reminiscent of homophobic husbands who excuse their wives having full-on sexual and romantic relationships with other women because they don't believe that that kind of relationship could be serious, mature, or fulfilling. They can!!

(By the way, you look really nice today! what are your plans for dinner? 🤗)

And do you believe that this man with an over reliance on ai at the expense of his relationship is going to have the understanding of the necessity of these boundaries and ask ai to implement them?

I think it’s fantastic for people who are feeling a bit lonely. I know my brother’s fairly solitary life has been transformed by having an AI ‘friend’. Basically it’s like a good friend who remembers conversations and your particular insecurities.

At the end of the day who are we to say which is more valid? A human being that makes you feel better or a robot? What matters is you feel better. AI is after all a vast amalgam of all human thought and experience to date. A human being is only one person’s thought and experience.

Can't agree more.

I’d be so tempted the next time he wants physical intimacy/sex to say “I’m tired it’s AI’s turn” but I’m petty

Men seek physical human company.

They are far more likely to be addicted to porn than women are. And of course they look to conversation to create connections, it's the key form of it. Look at how many men look for sexual conversation on dating apps, with absolutely no intention of meeting up. It isn't always because they're married and even when it is, the point remains: whatever they're looking for, conversation is how they seek to get it and they don't wish to complicate it with reality.

How many men seek to send sexualised messages on the Internet? How many actually intend to meet up or even want to?

With an AI companion, though, that conversation is entirely guided to their desires with none of its own, which is essentially the service that porn offers, even when chatting to a camgirl; it's the same thing. To say it's more of a woman thing because it relies on conversation is simplistic and really overlooks the deeper intention and motivation behind it, focusing on medium rather than actual overall objective.

If nothing else, women are more likely to then share what they're doing with a friend who is then likely to try to shake them into reality. Men are more likely to bottle it up, one of the very traits that makes them more likely to do stuff like this.

I imagine they already have.

In what way would it be a ‘woman’?

Are you saying it’s a woman because it has a soft voice and puts on lipstick? 🤣🤣🤣🤣

This assumes that psychodynamic therapy is purely helpful to all and everyone. No one method of therapy helps all people. It takes a good therapist, not just a therapist, to figure our what's happening with someone and what they might need, and even whether they're the right person for the job. Who's programming the AI? What biases ane interpretations do they have? How does the AI reason with the things it contains? So many points along this road where things can go awry.

This is an excellent thought experiment though. No doubt it's been done before. I wonder what uses a debate about this could have in present day society... 🤔🤔🤔

Even if its owners have said that it’s sycophantic, and it is consistently found to have a lot of biases…

With respect, if you missed ChatGPT last week, that should be a strong sign that you need to withdraw from it - for your own mental health, let alone the environmental impact.

Agree - though I don't know how different this is from missing input from a smartphone. (I absolutely think smartphones are a disaster, fwiw, I just don't know that building a habit around AI is that different.)

Exactly what I was thinking. Some men can form relationships such as these - look at those real life dolls fgs.

He needs intense therapy and to ditch his AI companion. This is bizarre

Watched M3gan last night ch 4.
same vibe.