The New Relationship Minefield: Your Partner’s AI Chats

Lindsey Hall’s boyfriend was asleep on her shoulder when she accidentally discovered what he’d been telling ChatGPT about her.Her phone had died, so she picked up his to look up something for work. Then she noticed a chat titled “Relationship Issues and Uncertainty.” Inside, she says, were complaints about her appearance, doubts about his attraction to her, and a sentence she still remembers verbatim: “I’m just not proud of her.”While he peacefully snoozed beside her, she learned that ChatGPT had issued a verdict on the state of their relationship: Her boyfriend needed to end it.When she first saw the chat title, Hall figured it was about a familiar disagreement: She loved her three cats; he wasn’t an animal person. “This is probably about the cats,” she remembers thinking. She hadn’t expected a list of complaints about her. “Nothing was positive,” she says. “Not one thing.”Hall got up, collected her toothbrush and charger, and slipped out the front door. “I just had nothing to say,” she says. “I had nothing but rage at that point.”Couples have long had ways to discover things they weren’t supposed to know about each other: rifling through a journal, stealing a glance at incoming t...