Relationships • Media & Technology
Using AI to Have Better Relationships
It’s understandably daunting to be invited to rely on a machine to do something that, throughout our lives, we’d believed we needed to take care of by ourselves. The first people to step aboard a plane or talk on the telephone must have felt a similar kind of vertigo. Yet there are now immense opportunities to improve our relationships through the use of Artificial Intelligence. Here are the main ways we suggest that you set yourself up with an AI couples therapist:
1. Pick the right AI
There are many AI platforms on offer. For relationships, we are drawn to https://claude.ai/ which seems especially thoughtful, kind and perspicacious. Better ones may well emerge in time; this feels like the leader for now.
2. Allow it to know you and your partner
Open a chat thread which you then return to repeatedly. Give it a title: ‘My AI Relationship Therapist.’ The more you revisit this thread, the more the machine will know you; and the cleverer and more on point it can be in its advice.
Start by giving the AI the following prompt: ‘I want you to function as my AI couples therapist. In your answers and suggestions, please draw on the long tradition of psychodynamic psychotherapy. Make particular use of attachment theory where necessary.’
Next give the AI as much background as possible on you and your partner.
Tell it about your respective childhoods and patterns of attachment:
– My relationship with my mother was…
– My relationship with my father was…
– My mother made me feel…
– My father made me feel…
Allow it insight into your neurotic or fragile or awkward characteristics:
– I worry inordinately that…
– I can’t cope so well with…
– What can make me difficult to be around…
– I might be gently teased for being…
Turn to your experience of previous adult relationships:
– In my first relationship, I…
– Typically in love I…
– I crave…
– What has tended to go wrong is…
Now turn to your present relationship:
– What I love about my partner…
– What is tricky with my partner…
– The main flashpoints are…
– In a recent argument…
– My attachment style is…
– My partner’s attachment style is…
3. Allow AI to come to your assistance in Crises
Once the AI is sufficiently well programmed, its particular skill lies in its ability to give balanced, sane, kind advice at moments of crisis. When our neocortex has gone offline, when it’s very late or the mood has become hugely stressful, it will still be there as a beacon of reason, ready for us to lean on.
Download a version of the platform on your phone and, when there is a dispiriting argument or mood brewing over dinner, pause discussion with your partner, pull out your phone and immediately tell AI the following (it has voice activation):
– My partner has said that…
– I’ve responded by saying that…
– They are feeling…
– I am feeling…
– What should we do in the next 30 minutes to bring down the temperature?
– What might we do tomorrow morning?
– What is it we are forgetting?
– What are three things we might both try to keep in mind right now?
Make a habit of turning to AI during all kinds of moments of tension. For example:
– During a sulk: ask it to write your partner an ideal message to change the dynamic.
– If you are feeling resentful around your partner: ask AI to write a message outlining the sources of your upset (or helping you to diagnose what these might be).
– Complete the sentence: What I need my partner to understand is… Then ask AI to turn your answer into a message that the partner stands the highest chance of sympathising with.
At points, allow it into the largest dilemmas of all:
– Should we be together?
– Given the tensions between us, should we be thinking of committing? What are the upsides and the downsides?
– Given what you know of my attachment style, what should I bear in mind in relation to this person?
Since the dawn of time, we’ve been more or less alone with our relationships. At best, we’ve been able to share our sorrows with a parent, therapist or friend hours or days after an event. Now we have the chance to allow an ideal gentle authority figure to listen to our emotional histories and then, with our traumas and fault-lines in mind, to provide calming thoughts based on the long history of psychotherapy at especially difficult moments. This doesn’t replace books, personal insights or real therapy, indeed the more we know of ourselves, the more AI can accurately guide us to our wishes. For too long, we have thought of love as an emotion, it is in fact a skill – and there is no reason why, as with so many other tools, we wouldn’t allow one of our AI machines to lend us a hand with one of the great challenges of our lives.
