Niharika Abbaraju uses artificial intelligence in her work as a cancer researcher. But when she leaves the lab, the tool becomes her conversation coach. ChatGPT helps her draft pickup lines for dating apps and icebreakers for parties.
She'll even, at times, fire it up to formulate a response to the person standing next to her. When the conversation shifts to an unfamiliar book or article, for instance, Abbaraju will call up an AI summary. The vibe she's going for: "Like, I read sometimes," she says.
It isn't that Abbaraju can't think for herself, she says. AI just makes things smoother.
Abbaraju, 20, is part of a growing cohort of young adults outsourcing deeply human tasks to AI. Many, struggling with social anxieties great or small, will seek assistance ahead of a face-to-face encounter. Others let their bots script their text messages and even mediate their dating lives as a digital Cyrano de Bergerac.
Abbaraju and her peers will have to distinguish between productive use and unhealthy reliance, she says. In their quest to "optimize" everything with AI, she worries they're sacrificing what made the unscripted moments so meaningful.
"You need to still have those skills yourself in conversation and communication," she says. "You can use ChatGPT to help you build them, but not as 'Tell me what to say at every single moment in time when I'm with this person.'"
Mental-health professionals advise caution. The use of bots as social buffers points to an "epidemic of self-mistrust," they say. If you use AI to polish everything, you might lose faith in your own voice.
'Kind of creepy'
Andrea Wallace, a 24-year-old personal trainer in Austin, Texas, says bot-generated messages are appearing more in chats with romantic partners. Texts from a man her friend was seeing had been unwieldy. Suddenly, they took on perfect grammar and syntax.
"There is no way that this man who was struggling to type out 'there,' 'their' and 'they're' just sent this text message," Wallace says. Texts should be messy anyway, she adds, because the intimacy comes from informality.
And because chatbots cobble together sentences from patterns found in human language, AI messages have their own problematic telltales -- clichés and stilted sentences. Lucas Dvorak, 22, uses AI all the time but steers clear of it when he texts his girlfriend.
During a talk on the subject, she told him it would be lazy and unromantic of him to treat their conversations as another task to be 'hacked' with AI. Plus, she added, it's just plain weird.
"She thinks it's kind of creepy, and I respect that," says Dvorak, who studies industrial engineering and data science at Northwestern University.
It's a disservice to both parties, according to Ashleigh Golden, a clinical psychologist and adjunct clinical professor at Stanford University's School of Medicine. General-purpose chatbots were built for productivity, not relationships, she says. When people offload their communication to the tools, it can signal a lack of care to their recipients. It can also erode the sender's tolerance for uncertainty, she adds.
"If you're running a text past AI to check whether it sounds OK, you're kind of slowly teaching yourself that your own read can't be trusted," Golden says.
That's especially problematic for the socially anxious. AI may help people avoid the sting of social missteps, but the relief is temporary, Golden says. The tool can become a crutch keeping people from trusting their own judgment.
A feelings processor
Faced with a personal issue at school, Kalin Lincoln used ChatGPT to tweak the tone of an "angry email" before sending it. She says processing her feelings first and then smoothing out the language teed her up for a more productive dialogue with the recipient.
Lincoln, 20, who studies food science at Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C., has gotten in the habit of using her chatbot to prepare for dates and tense confrontations. She drafts "note cards" that she then gut checks with her mom or a friend.
On one occasion, turning to the bot for help navigating an in-person chat with friends actually backfired on her. She says it told her the "opposite of what I needed to do."
Alexandra Friedman, a Seattle-based friendship and relationship coach, thinks it's OK to use AI to scaffold an uncomfortable conversation but not to lean on it throughout. AI is useful in crafting what to say, not how to say it, she says. That's something you have to cultivate without an intermediary.
Friedman advises limiting AI conversational role-play to once a week for recurring interactions, or to the day before a big event. She guides her clients to prompt AI to engage in the natural give-and-take of a conversation instead of asking it to generate a full script.
Chatbots can help unlock conversations someone with social anxiety might otherwise avoid, she says, but it's no substitute for real emotional regulation.
"Feeling uncomfortable is part of the human experience," she says. "That's something technology can never feel."
Write to Natalie Kaufman at natalie.kaufman@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
July 26, 2026 12:00 ET (16:00 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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