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Teen boys are using ChatGPT as their wingman. What could go wrong?

AI is teaching teenagers about love now.

It’s not necessarily the guys you might expect, Apollo Knapp told me.

These are 6-foot-tall high-school athletes, guys who are social and popular. “They’re the type of people that are friends with everybody, who get dapped up in the hallway every two feet,” said Knapp, an 18-year-old high school senior in Ohio and a board member at sexual violence prevention nonprofit SafeBAE.

But at his school, these are the guys using AI to help them talk to girls. They’ll paste their texts into ChatGPT for feedback before sending, he said. Or, they’ll send their own photos to ChatGPT and ask, “am I cute?” Or, they’ll simply ask for moral support when they’re “too scared, maybe, to confront women.”

Girls and non-binary teens don’t need to lean on ChatGPT as much, Knapp said; they’re more likely to have a circle of friends ready and willing to workshop their texts. But guys are more isolated, socialized to believe it’s weak to talk about their feelings.

Worse, they’ve grown up on a steady diet of media telling them that “if you say the wrong thing” to a girl, “she’s going to accuse you of something,” Knapp said. Even if those messages aren’t accurate, they get inside teen boys’ heads, making them feel like they have to screen everything through ChatGPT to make sure it’s okay.

The drift of boys and young men away from everyone else in American society has been an enduring theme of the last few years. The fear is that guys, especially straight guys, are getting sucked into manosphere podcasts and becoming more and more alienated from the girls and women they, in theory, want to date. This is an oversimplified narrative, and there’s reason to hope that boys and men are more connected, and more interested in connection, than their most unpleasant listening material might suggest.

But in talking to teens and experts about AI and relationships, I did get the sense that boys need better outlets for their feelings than we’re giving them. And while ChatGPT might help some kids in some circumstances, teens of all genders need a more reliable support system — one that doesn’t require an electricity-guzzling data center to answer a question.

After all, Knapp........

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