Missed Connections

What you gain — and what you lose — when AI is your first stop

My daughter, Etta, came into our lives the same winter that ChatGPT did.

At the time, I was largely using this new app for party tricks — writing New Years Eve toasts in the form of Beyonce lyrics and the like.

Which means I was turning to a more ancient technology for my new parent queries: the group-text.

My husband and I became parents a few years behind many of our close friends in Oakland. Which meant the first few months was full of text messages like:

• Is it normal for babies to breathe so loudly at night?

• How long do I need to buy breastmilk to supplement formula? It’s really expensive.

• I know you’re not supposed to shake babies, but this instagram video is really swinging a baby to calm it down. Is that okay?

Two and a half years later, Etta is talking nonstop, and ChatGPT is too.

What started as a fringe tool in my life has quietly become a constant collaborator. It writes some of my emails, builds itineraries, helps me process personal stuff — and it’s often my first stop. Compared with the internet’s noisy mashup of advice, AI feels tidy, confident, and instant.

This includes being a first stop for many parenting questions.

Etta recently hit the daunting milestone of being able to climb out of her crib. Which means, begrudgingly, we are getting her a big-girl bed.

What would likely have been frantic text to my group chat was a simple query to ChatGPT.

With absolutely no shade to my friends — who are incredible parents and generous advice givers — this is arguably better.

Five clean bullet points. Best practices. Empathy wrapped in efficiency. It didn’t mind that I was asking at 11:30 PM. It even offered to script “night-one” talking points for Etta.

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A pivot away from people

This shift in how I was seeking parenting advice is part of a broader sea change — especially for young people.

I first heard it named at The Rithm Project’s Human Connection and AI Summit this past May. Sneha Revanur — founder of Encode and a Stanford student — described how she uses AI at the end of long days. When questions and worries start swirling, she would turn to ChatGPT:

“It gives really good advice. And I’d rather not impose on other people before I first clarify and work through my thinking with this tool.”

Sneha is not alone.

We asked several of our current Youth Fellows if they have started outsourcing asks for help away from people to AI. The answer was a resounding yes

It’s a trend that is palpable across Gen-Z, from entry-level jobs to college campuses. Pronita Mehrotram, an author focused on the neuroscience behind creative thinking, recently shared this anecdote on LinkedIn.

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What is gained and lost

In the short term, it often makes perfect sense to reach for it.

Over the longer term, there’s also a case to be made that offloading some of these questions can create room for more meaningful interactions with real people. Kashyap Rajesh, a youth fellow at The Rithm Project and a student at Cornell, makes that optimistic case:

“AI doesn’t replace the relationship but gives us the bandwidth to make the relationship more layered, deeper, intentional. If AI fields the basics (the quick fact-checks, the ‘what’s this term mean’ type questions), that actually clears more room for us to lean into the second-order parts of relationships — curiosity, interpretation, and deeper emotional exchange.”

I’m sold that it’s not zero-sum. I see the perks every day in my own collaborations with ChatGPT. And still, I worry about the long-term costs of a massive, rapid redirect from people to AI.

When I think back to that group chat, the advice carried more than facts. Behind each tip were war stories that made me feel less alone. Between troubleshooting threads were jokes and memes that landed at the exact moment I needed to laugh. A casual question about bottle nipples could turn into an invite for pizza.

Most importantly, embedded in that back-and-forth was the connective tissue of meaningful relationships.

Every small ask was practice in vulnerability — an implicit, “I can’t do this alone. I need you.” Every reply was an unspoken, “I see you. I’ve got you.”

Those tiny, bi-directional interactions are where durable intimacy forms. Or sometimes even the looser ties that can open up doors. They are less efficient, yes — and sometimes the advice wasn’t any better than what AI could offer — but they build the kind of reciprocal care algorithms can’t replicate.

I don’t have any plans to stop using AI to field questions or process my own thinking. But it does mean I’m rethinking the calculus for when it’s worth “bothering” people with requests I could route to ChatGPT. I’ll try to live in the “yes, and.”

The messy, human work of leaning on and showing up for one another — even for the small stuff — might offer much more than a good answer.

Your turn

Scroll back through your recent AI queries. Pick one to send to some people in your life — maybe a close friend or a more distant acquaintance.

What does their response offer that was different?

What felt different about receiving it?

What else comes from that exchange beyond getting the answer?

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