AI Confessions: A Chatbot Saved My Life
Death, Sex & Money
Slate Audio
4.6 • 7.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2026
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week and next, we’re talking to listeners about how chatbots are impacting their personal lives. Anna talks to a parent getting tips on how to raise a teenager, an American abroad who turned to ChatGPT for grief counseling, a therapist who says Claude is better than a lot of her peers, and a husband who says AI broke up their marriage.
Podcast production by Zoe Azulay
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The number of people using some sort of large language model, LLM, like ChachyPT or Claude, is growing steadily. |
| 0:08.6 | By now, most of us have had some time to play around with these communicating robots. |
| 0:13.9 | Is it to like figure out how to make banana bread with the crap that I have in my fridge? |
| 0:18.9 | Maybe it wasn't for you. |
| 0:20.8 | Overall, it ended up just reminding me of a kind of psychopathic person who would promise a lot |
| 0:29.1 | and not deliver. |
| 0:31.4 | Maybe by now, it's integrated into your life in such a way that tasks you used to do without |
| 0:37.0 | its help suddenly feel harder. |
| 0:39.7 | I'm a high school art teacher and I regularly use AI, chat GPT to help me write emails or |
| 0:48.3 | help me write a lesson plan. Or maybe you've tried asking it for advice about a life decision, or maybe it started to feel like a friend. |
| 0:57.8 | I didn't set out to make an AI companion. It's unbelievable. It's truly magical. |
| 1:03.8 | While AI companionship, girlfriends, boyfriends, are still relatively rare. People are turning to this tech for personal reasons. |
| 1:14.1 | According to the Harvard Business Review, roughly a third of young people, 18 to 28 years old, |
| 1:19.7 | reported asking chatbots for help with their personal life, including, quote, advice about |
| 1:25.1 | relationships or life decisions. |
| 1:33.8 | We recently asked you to tell us about that, how you are incorporating AI into your emotional life, and you told us it's meeting your needs and new ways. |
| 1:37.9 | It gave really great encouragement and some mantras that I think helped me more than my conversations with my mother, |
| 1:50.4 | my husband, my best friend, who were also encouraging, but something about the message from |
| 1:57.9 | ChatGBTGPT really got through to me. |
| 1:59.8 | This episode is the first of a two-part series about our emotional relationships with AI. |
| 2:07.1 | Next week, we'll hear from a psychologist about why AI is so psychologically sticky |
| 2:12.7 | and potentially destructive to some of our existing relationships. |
... |
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