The People Who Outsource Emotional Labor to AI

One day not long ago, Franky, a 40-something woman who lives in the mid-Atlantic region, got an infuriating text message from her aunt.

It was just the latest truth-stretching missive she had sent, and Franky’s impulse was to write back: “You’re a liar.

You’ve always been a liar.

All you do is lie.” Instead, she asked an AI program to write a response that was less “condescending and unnecessarily emotional.” AI-ese, Franky told me, helps make her responses more logical and neutral.

Another message that she sent her aunt after running it through a chatbot read, “I respect you and I expect the same in return.

I want to have a mature conversation.” The aunt appreciated it, Franky said—she called her and sounded calm.

Franky is among a number of people—we’ll never truly know how many, will we?—who secretly use AI programs such as ChatGPT and Claude when they interact with difficult family members.

I interviewed several of them.

Mostly, my interviewees use AI to communicate with individuals they don’t want an emotionally close relationship with—an ex they co-parent with, for example, or an in-law—but whom they nevertheless can’t escape. (Because they are describing tense personal relations, most of my interviewees requested not to be identified by their full name.) People use AI to both interpret messages they receive and help them write their own to send.

If they have to, say, call out rude behavior or express disagreement about whether the kids need a certain type of therapy, they type what they really want to say into one of these programs, ask the AI to nice it up a little, and paste the resulting verbiage into their text messages.

Outsourcing correspondence to AI has enabled them to maintain harmony without spending too much time thinking about how to draft a perfect response.

As Franky put it, using AI lets her have a relationship without allowing it to “live rent-free in my brain.” Franky said that in her family, it’s important for people “all to have, I don’t know, peace.” She and others have found that they can improve their relationships and at least increase the probability of peace by removing emotion from conversations.

And that’s where AI truly excels. [ Read: There’s a name for the people who drain you ] Another woman I spoke with told me about how Claude had helped her revise a text to a family member who often misinterprets her words.

This person, she said, sent her a message implying that he wanted her out of his life.