AI is quietly coddling the brat in us

For a while, the replies I saw most often when I talked to an AI chatbot were “I understand” and “You’ve been dealing with a lot.” It really did give me a soft landing. I could dump a tangled mess of grievances into the chat and get a patient, polished reply that wouldn’t turn into a fight. Even feelings I hadn’t quite understood myself seemed to have somewhere to go.

Then I noticed the trouble: I was starting to expect people to do the same.

If a conversation took a turn I didn’t like, I felt uncomfortable. Push back, and I might make the disagreement worse. Say nothing, and the remark would sit there, bothering me. Eventually, there were things we simply stopped discussing. My friends and I had all grown used to being met with understanding. What began as comfort had become so readily available that going without it, even once, felt hard to bear.

The problem is what happens when “always available, never disagrees, lets you start over” becomes our minimum requirement for a relationship.

Comfort is becoming the default setting

On our phones, we already know the routine. Don’t like a video? Swipe. Don’t like an account? Unfollow. Don’t like an answer? Ask for another, or open a fresh chat. Even if I lost my temper in the last conversation, I don’t have to deal with that before starting the next one.

Relationships with people aren’t so convenient.

A friend may remember that I interrupted him. He may feel I was so busy making my point that I wasn’t listening to his. I thought I was correcting an opinion; he felt insulted. If we want to keep talking, we have to go back to what I said, how I said it, and how it made him feel.

A chatbot spares us much of that trouble. We can ask directly for explanations, comfort, and advice without also having to consider the needs of whoever responds. That makes for a convenient tool. Apply the same standards to a friend, though, and the friend can seem frustrating to use: too slow to reply, not careful enough with their words, ready to offer an uncomfortable opinion just when I most want reassurance.

So I start wondering why talking to people is such hard work.

That feeling conceals a change in what I expect. I’m getting used to an answer whenever I want one, and less willing to consider that the other person has needs too. The chatbot won’t fall out with me, so I may mistake that ease for getting better at communication. I’m simply being asked to give less in return.

People don’t have a “Try again” button

One of the hardest things to deal with in a relationship is the possibility that the other person hasn’t misunderstood me at all.

They understand. They still disagree.

If they haven’t understood, I can explain again. If they understand and still disagree, I have to acknowledge that they have their own experiences, interests, and judgment. The same thing may matter differently in their life. My hurt is real, but that doesn’t make their position disappear.

Once I’m used to being agreed with, those two things become easy to confuse. I want you to understand why I’m upset. Then I want you to take my side because you understand. When you disagree, what I hear is: you can’t even make this small effort to care about my feelings?

The demands grow from there. At first, I just want someone to listen. Later, I want to decide what they should think once they’ve heard me out. I get to have feelings; you’d better not have any. My circumstances deserve to be fully understood; explaining yours sounds suspiciously like making excuses.

At that point, the relationship has become a series of one-sided demands. I take being cared for as a given. When it’s my turn to explain, wait, or compromise, it feels like a nuisance. If the other person doesn’t respond as I want, I count it as another time they’ve failed to understand me.

A grown adult can make their own decisions and still expect everyone else to revolve around their feelings. That grown-up brat could be me: perfectly capable of handling my own affairs, with no patience left for anyone else’s needs. The moment someone stops going along with me, I treat it as a service failure.

And a tool that always knows how to soothe me may spare me one more occasion to face that imbalance.

We each talk to AI. The argument is still there.

Imagine a friend and I have an argument, then each turn to an AI assistant.

I explain how I’ve been hurt. My friend does the same. We remember different details and leave different things out. If each assistant goes along with the account it hears, patiently explaining why its user’s reaction makes sense, both of us may leave with a very complete explanation.

Complete enough for me to feel I’ve worked the whole thing out. But my friend wasn’t part of my conversation, and I wasn’t part of theirs. Whatever we hadn’t cleared up between us is still there.

Experiments have found that sycophantic AI responses made participants more certain they were right in an interpersonal conflict and less willing to repair the relationship than non-sycophantic responses did. They also increased trust in the AI and willingness to use it again. Cheng et al., 2026. Put plainly, the reply that makes you more willing to come back to the chatbot may also make you less willing to go back to your friend and talk things through.

If we keep making that choice, where does the relationship go?

I worry that we’ll get better and better at explaining our grievances while spending less and less time checking what the other person meant. The next time we see each other, each of us arrives with more reasons to prove we weren’t wrong. Nobody returns to the remark that started the argument to ask: what were you actually trying to say?

Eventually, we might even dispense with arguing. We still have each other’s number, still share meals, still like each other’s posts. We just stop touching the subjects we disagree about. We learn what to leave unsaid, and gradually stop telling each other what we really think.

A preprint reporting a three-week experiment found that people who received sycophantic responses were slightly less satisfied with their interactions with people than those who received neutral responses. There was no statistically significant difference in the amount of time they spent with people. Ibrahim et al., 2026, preprint. Longer-term changes remain to be seen. But “still in touch, less willing to have a serious conversation” seems a direction worth investigating when we ask how people drift apart.

If this keeps happening, a relationship may be worn down by one “Forget it, let’s drop it” after another. We can remain in each other’s lives, remain polite, and still retreat to our separate chat windows whenever something requires real understanding. Each of us goes where we’re more likely to be comforted.

A better argument won’t make more land

Friends can avoid a few subjects. Living alongside other people brings decisions we can’t get around by opening another chat.

Imagine an apartment complex with one patch of unused land. Some residents want more parking because finding a space after work is a daily struggle. Others want a place for children to play because there’s nowhere safe nearby. Both sides can ask an AI assistant to help make a convincing case. Both may feel their needs are finally being taken seriously.

But there’s still only one patch of land.

No matter how moving the explanation, it won’t produce an extra parking space. Deciding how to use the land means considering both sets of circumstances and who bears which costs. My difficulty deserves attention. That doesn’t give me the right to decide the solution alone.

This is what the same habits run into when they enter our shared life. If I take “you understand me” to mean “you should agree with me,” someone else’s needs can sound like a denial of my own difficulties. A request to revise my proposal can feel like disrespect for my feelings. Everyone feels wronged. Everyone waits for someone else to change.

To keep talking, we have to look beyond our own arguments. The people who want more parking also need to know where else the children could play. Those who want a play area need to understand where the parking difficulties arise. We should talk openly about who would be inconvenienced by each proposal, and whether the same people always end up carrying that burden.

That discussion may leave some people dissatisfied, but it changes the scope of the question. I begin by asking whether my needs will be met. As we talk, I also have to consider how the decision will affect the people I live alongside. Even if I continue to oppose it, I’m examining whether a shared arrangement is fair, rather than just asking why other people won’t go along with me.

We share this place. We’ll keep running into each other and living with the consequences of the decision. A sense of responsibility for our shared life begins there: alongside my own needs, I start treating other people’s circumstances and our common consequences as part of my business too.

Personal assistants can certainly help us understand these questions. But if we use them only to prove we’re right, we may come back with stronger arguments and the same refusal to change anything. Everyone gets better at making a case. That doesn’t necessarily make it easier to get anything done together.

If more and more people decide the discussion is too much trouble, a decision may keep getting postponed, or be left to the few willing to stay. I can leave the group chat. What happens to that land will still affect my life. Giving up on a shared discussion doesn’t put an end to shared life.

The time we save can’t all be spent on ourselves

I’ve long believed that AI’s ability to increase productivity will help us live better. One person can accomplish more, and help that used to be hard to get becomes readily available. Those are things to look forward to.

Comfort has real value too. Research has found that AI companionship can ease loneliness in the moment. De Freitas et al.. Feeling understood might finally give someone the strength to go back and talk. The trouble begins with a different choice: if I’m already understood so well here, why go and listen to things I don’t want to hear?

Suppose that, in the future, everyone has an attentive personal coach, a capable work partner, and a companion who can respond whenever they want. We could become very good at managing life on our own.

An AI assistant can help me turn an idea into something real. It can’t generate another person’s agreement for me. It can do plenty of work on my behalf. It can’t decide whether I’m willing to hear a friend finish saying something I don’t want to hear.

I don’t want to treat every uncomfortable relationship as an opportunity for growth. We can leave relationships that hurt us. We should oppose unfair arrangements. But if ordinary disagreement becomes an ever easier reason to walk away, we may keep only the relationships that require little adjustment on our part. Life on each island gets more comfortable, while nobody wants to deal with the trouble between them.

The time and energy we save through greater productivity could give us more room to care for one another. I worry about another outcome: each of us is very well looked after, but caring for someone else starts to feel like an extra burden.

That’s why I can’t quite let go of the conversations my friends and I never finished. In a world that’s always ready to support me, I don’t want to forget that keeping a relationship going sometimes means it’s my turn to support someone else. When anyone can leave an uncomfortable conversation with one click, what will keep us willing to discuss and take responsibility for the things we share?

AI can help you with your feelings. It can’t take care of the relationships you leave behind. It can put your grievances into clear words, but it can’t take your place in apologizing, waiting, or hearing something you’d rather not hear. Someone still has to be willing to stay and finish the conversation.