By Angela Haupt

AI might not have taken your job yet—but it’s already writing your breakup text.

What began as a productivity tool has quietly become a social one, and people increasingly consult it for their most personal moments: drafting apologies, translating passive-aggressive texts, and, yes, deciding how to end relationships.

“I wholeheartedly believe that AI is shifting the relational bedrock of society,” says Rachel Wood, a cyberpsychology expert and founder of the AI Mental Health Collective. “People really are using it to run their social life: Instead of the conversations we used to have—with neighbors or at clubs or in our hobbies or our faith communities—those conversations are being rerouted into chatbots.”

When Pat Pataranutaporn thinks about the effects of long-term AI usage, his main question is this: Is it limiting our ability to express ourselves? Or does it help people express themselves better? As founding director of the cyborg psychology research group and co-director of MIT Media Lab’s Advancing Humans with AI research program, Pataranutaporn is interested in ways that people can use AI to promote human flourishing, pro-social interaction, and human-to-human interaction.

The goal is to use this technology to “help people be better, gain more agency, and feel that they're in control of their lives,” he says, “rather than having technology constrain them like social media or previous technologies.”