Can a ChatBot Save Your Relationship?

In this episode, the hosts explore how more and more people are turning to AI for relationship advice. But is that advice any good or can it do more harm than good? Can a chatbot be useful in solving relationship communication issues? Randy and Beverly explain why AI might have a place in relationships but that place probably isn't serving as a low-budget, on-demand source of therapeutic wisdom. 

Heart Versus Head is a podcast about relationship styles and how those relationship styles influence communication in the most important relationships. The hosts - Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock - are a married couple who are sought-after relationship coaches, award-winning authors and regular people who (like everyone in relationships) are just trying to stay connected through all the noise of life in the modern world. You can learn more about the couple and their work at HeartAndHeadCoaching.com, where you'll learn to fight better and connect again.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:06

Welcome to Heart vs. Head, a podcast that helps couples communicate and fight better. Here are your hosts, Randy Hampton and Beverly Craddock.

SPEAKER_02: 0:19

Hey everybody, it's Randy and Beverly. Welcome back to Heart versus Head for the Week. Beverly, how are you? Good. You look amazing. Thank you. You look spectacular. You sound spectacular. It's great to great to hang out with you. I mean, I we hang out all the time, but this is when we hang out with the microphones on, and I guess that's that's kind of the point. This podcast is to help you, well, fight better, quite frankly, in your relationship. We really want people to be able to use conflict in their relationship to make their relationship stronger because it has that potential. When you can understand and actually communicate with your partner, you might be able to get something from those disagreements that pop up anytime in any kind of a relationship with two people, but they seem to pop up a lot more in the uh in the intimate relationships of our life, thus this uh this particular podcast. We focus on heart and head. Hearts are the people that are kind of feeler-based, um, very much making their decisions in their relationship based on how everybody feels. So trying to trying to keep track of their partner, themselves, um, and and anybody else that's involved uh in a particular decision. And then heads are the partners that tend to just kind of go black, white, fact, right, wrong, and and and drive straight ahead and try and logic their way through everything. Neither is right, neither is wrong. Both are critical for a balanced relationship. I'm the I'm the head in our relationship. Beverly is the heart in our relationship, and so that's that's what the podcast is about. Did I miss anything in in the overview there, Beverly?

SPEAKER_01: 1:58

No, just that we believe that communication is one of the most important tools in that toolbox, and that's what our background is in.

SPEAKER_02: 2:07

Uh, listeners around the country, around the world, and uh, we we got an email that we want to talk about this week. We're going to dive into a very interesting topic, one that is emerging out there. We want to talk about chatbots. And chatbots are becoming pretty involved in just about everything in life. They do make our lives and our our jobs a bit easier in in all ways. Uh, but they're but they're starting to be relied on for a lot of things that maybe they're not tuned up for. So, can a chat bot like chat GPT, can a chat bot save your relationship? And that's what we want to talk about this week. And it comes from an email from a listener in New York. Hi, Randy and Beverly, Loving the Heart versus Head podcast. Skip over identifying details here. I listen weekly on my subway ride to work. It's really helped me understand why my last few relationships have hit trouble. D, he goes on to say, I was looking back on the most recent relationship the other day, and I entered some questions about my last girlfriend into Chat GPT, and I was able to get some clear insights about what happened to us. It was eye-opening. Below are some of the things that chat said. What do you think? And then there's a long list of suggestions and and and items from the chat bot about maybe what was happening in that relationship. Once again, this is uh uh an email from uh D, uh initial D in New York City. And uh D, we appreciate the email. And if if anybody wants to ask questions like this, you always can. Info at heartandheadcoaching.com. But Beverly, we're gonna talk about chatbots. What initially kind of off the top? What what are your thoughts on this?

SPEAKER_01: 3:55

I think it lines up with the problems you have when you reach out to your friends or or family sometimes to get relationship advice. And the problem with that as well throughout the years has always been that you're you're asking someone who A probably doesn't have the the most experience other than just the failed relationships that we've we've all had until we we find our partner. B, they're only hearing one side of it, which is also similar when people are typing things in. It's just a one-sided conversation, one perspective. And I think that that when when you reach out to these other people or or electronically, it's not always the same values you have. It it can just create more confusion, really, instead of clarity. So I I think it's a bad idea.

SPEAKER_02: 4:52

I would I would take it even a step farther. You talk about talking to to family and friends, which we've had family and friends in our lives as humans for, oh, let's say a million years. You know, as long as there's been humans, we've been buddying up with people and and been related to people. And for heaven's sakes, for about a million years, none of them have really solved relationship problems, right? Things still keep getting uh more advanced in the relationship problem department. That said, uh, I I think at least with friends and family, they got a chance, man. They know you, they they have a chance to give you some good insight and advice into how you are and how you were raised. I think asking chat GPT is like, bear with me on this one. Let's say you have um a 13-year-old autistic kid who lives next door to you, who reads encyclopedias all the time and knows everything, and maybe has a math skill where you can give them like a date on a calendar and they can tell you what day of the week it was because they know the math formula instantly in their head. It's it's kind of like that, that, that really, really smart kid going over there and asking about your relationship. You wouldn't do it that way.

SPEAKER_01: 6:06

There's no emotion in that. There, you know, when you think about uh robots, they they don't feel the way that we feel. How many relationships have they been in?

SPEAKER_02: 6:16

Well, and that's the thing. There's no there's no wisdom or experience or certainly no nuance. And so that's a that's a big, big, big challenge in in, I think, working with with chatbots, but it goes further than that. For anybody that's done any work on a on a chatbot, it becomes an echo chamber. And this is this is similar to social media in that regard. You know, if you put in there that your partner is a jerk and did this or whatever, chat GPT is not going to come back at you and argue in favor of your partner. It's going to tell you, you know, where they screwed up, why they screwed up, how they screwed up. And it really begins to feed what is a pretty scary loop. Now we see some of this going on out there. There was a an article in The Futurist recently that that interviewed a whole lot of people. The article wasn't well written, but they talked to a lot of people who actually said that you know their their relationship snowballed and just went way bad when their partner started throwing out Chat GPT responses for what you know what they were doing as a partner. If you tell Chat GPT that somebody's a bad person, you're gonna get a lot of feedback that that person is a bad person. And it just kind of reinforces what you already believe.

SPEAKER_01: 7:44

Right. You're not taking responsibility for your side of it, it's just more blame on top of criticism for this other person, which in in our world, when we deal with couples and individuals working on relationship topics and issues, if I had five dollars for each person that came in and told me their partner was a narcissist, you know, we'd we'd be on another beach somewhere. Um for true. Right. So, you know, if you put that into the chat and and that's what they're responding from, you you say narcissist, and here comes uh a completely crazy list. And a lot of people think, oh yeah, it sounds like my partner when it's such a very small percentage of the population that actually are narcissists. So the information in is poor, the information coming out is worse. And what we find is it's really just a head and a heart. And we have a lot of experience with this stuff. We've seen it with thousands of couples, wrote a book on it. So I think you're much better off if you come to someone who is a third party in in person, human, or yeah, it could be online, I guess. We do a lot of Zoom and uh with coaching clients all around the world. However, you got to make sure the people you're working with are human. They've had some experience with relationships.

SPEAKER_02: 9:10

Well, we do tell people that we know how to screw them up because we were both previously married to other people, which did probably teach us some stuff. It's not the it's not the optimal approach, by the way. Yes, you can figure it out in your first relationship. That's what we're doing this for. There's a lot out there in media right now that talks about kind of this problem with people using chatbots as some kind of therapist or counselor. Chatbots, they become kind of ubiquitous in our lives and they're we're so connected to information, you know, this advanced type Google search where we have access to everything. But when you when you start to go down those rabbit trails and it just takes you down that rabbit trail just that much further and further all the time, we see implications of this. And you see these implications in places like now, California. California has just passed uh Senate Bill 243 out there, where there are laws that'll go into effect in January that try to make sure that the chatbot companies are putting some side rails in there. In in California, I think it was the death of a teenager there who died after having these long suicidal conversations with ChatGPT. The texts and stuff talk about all kinds of crazy things that investigators start finding when they're digging through chat logs and things. There was a story out of uh Colorado where a lawsuit was filed by a family whose 13-year-old daughter took her life after a series of problematic texts back and forth with Meta's chat bot.

SPEAKER_01: 10:52

It's dangerous.

SPEAKER_02: 10:54

It is, yeah. You know, you can't you can't count on it to to rescue. Does that make it completely useless? No, not at all. It's it's an absolute wealth of information. When you have everything ever written at your fingertips, it is a wealth of information. It can help you. It can, it can be useful to figure out what are the things, what are the questions I want to be asking, what are the things I should be asking myself, what steps can I take in this moment? But you see it going well beyond that with how people are using it, not just for information, not just for research, but for actually running their lives. There's even something now called chat fishing, which is like catfishing. You've heard about this where people, you know, will lie or or put a photo up that's not them and they then you go meet the person and oh no, I've been catfished. Well, well, now they call it chat fishing. There was a story in Vanity Fair, I believe, and it was a about a woman that went on a date and she showed up for the date and tried talking to this person, this guy that she had talked to text-wise for a couple of weeks, and she was very excited because he seemed so enlightened and was asking a lot of great questions about her and her life and her attachment styles and all of these things that made him sound very thoughtful. And as she sat there with him on this first date, she's like, Oh my god, that that's not who I was talking to. He was completely incapable of carrying on a conversation at the level that apparently chat GPT or whatever, whatever you know was out there was able to carry on a conversation. They've kind of coined this phrase chat fishing now. And so it's good that these things are out there because they can be useful in research, but man, you can't count on them.

SPEAKER_01: 12:37

I've seen it in other fields, obviously, not just relationships. I I've gone down rabbit holes myself looking up symptoms or things physically. Oh, what about my health? And what are what are tests that I could request from the doctor and so forth. And, you know, again, you got to take it with a grain of salt, you got to take the information and then go research that or or ask a professional if that would make any sense. Some of those things are great advice, some of them are not applicable at all. And I think the biggest thing about relationships is that it's it's not gonna be personal to to you and your partner. And there's there's nothing like sitting across from someone online, in person, and really diving in. Because when we have the questions, when we know the things to ask, you can drill right into what these problems are and how we're different, how we perceive the relationship differently, and now we can start to see how to change that. It's funny because I remember when we first came to Hawaii and you know, like 13, 14 years ago, and I remember somebody asking if we could uh somehow make an app for that. Could Beverly be an app? And just wanting to, you know, to profit, I'm sure, off of this kind of work. And I I really struggled to come up with a way to help this person. I mean, I'm sure they were gonna make it financially beneficial to all of us, but I really don't see yet where computers, robots are really going to replace us or anything like this anytime soon. Well, they certainly could.

SPEAKER_02: 14:27

I'd I'd spend more time if I got replaced. I'd spend more time hanging out with Beverly and maybe grow a garden or something. I I I don't know. Maybe it would be cool if it was if it was good at it.

SPEAKER_01: 14:38

Just remember that everything that you receive, I think it even has a small disclaimer that says to check and make sure the information is accurate.

SPEAKER_02: 14:47

So those small disclaimers um based on the lawsuits are now becoming big disclaimers that a lot of the chat bots have there when you start diving into all the areas uh of mental health. So uh for today's podcast, I thought we'd do it the right way and actually answer the question from D in New York City using ChatGPT. So I asked ChatGPT, is ChatGPT a good replacement for marriage therapy? Is it a good replacement for going and and seeing a coach, getting a getting a counselor? And chat had this advice. The bottom line, think of ChatGPT as a relationship assistant, not a counselor. It can help you prepare for conversations, reflect on challenges, and learn some relationship skills. But for serious or recurring issues, a person is essential, especially when emotions run high or you feel stuck in destructive patterns. That's from Chat GPT. They also added ChatGPT cannot diagnose or treat mental health conditions, mediate real-time emotional dynamics between partners, provide legal or ethical guidance in complex cases, offer personalized content tailored to your relationship history and dynamics, or recognize or intervene in dangerous situations. They do, though, boost Chat GPT as being able to help clarify thoughts before a conversation with your partner. And in that regard, maybe it does have some benefit and some use. That's what we've got for today on Heart versus Head. If you have questions, different thoughts, a different take on chatbots and relationships, um, certainly you can send us an email info at heart and headcoaching.com. Everybody, have a great week. We'll talk to you next time.

SPEAKER_00: 16:54

Thanks for listening to Heart vs. Head. You can learn more at Heartandheadcoaching.com and check out new podcast episodes every Wednesday. If you have a question for Randy and Beverly, send an email to info at Heart and Head Coaching.com.