Relationship skill formation works like any motor skill: it requires repeated exposure to friction, failure, and recovery. AI-assisted dating tools short-circuit that loop by removing the friction entirely. Two relationship experts, speaking to Fox News Digital, named that as the central risk of chatbot-mediated romance, and their argument has a specific mechanism behind it.
Where the loop breaks
Jackie Dorman, founder of the "Last Year Single" program, describes the problem in acquisition terms. Users are outsourcing profile creation, text responses, and breakup conversations to ChatGPT and similar tools. Each outsourced interaction is a rep the user never takes. "You haven't put in the reps of meeting people, saying stupid things, feeling embarrassed, learning how to converse with people," Dorman told Fox News Digital. She has watched AI enter every stage of the dating cycle, from first impressions through dissolution.
Her framing is direct: "We create, we think, we learn from our mistakes and we make new decisions. If we're always outsourcing it to a computer, to technology, then we are not going to learn." The skill atrophy compounds because the feedback loop that normally corrects behavior never closes.
The authentication gap
Dr. Christina Tracy Stein, a licensed marriage and family therapist, places the AI-polished profile inside a pattern she already tracks in couples work. She calls it "the big bait and switch": partners present optimized versions of themselves early in courtship, then gradually revert once the relationship is established. AI compresses and amplifies that initial presentation layer. Dorman puts the gap plainly: "It can make you seem like a great catch, but you still have to show up and be a great catch."
Stein does see limited utility for AI. Using a chatbot to organize thoughts when anxious or overwhelmed can help, she told Fox News Digital. The threshold for over-reliance, in her framing, is when a person stops checking AI output against their own instincts and stops asking whether a response feels authentic.
The companion question
Both Dorman and Stein flagged AI companion relationships as a separate category of concern. Stein described them as "very one-sided" because there is no accountability mechanism: a user can be dismissive or avoidant toward a chatbot, including products such as Claude, and face no social consequence. Dorman told Fox News Digital she has seen the trend mainly among women and offered a specific hypothesis: that they are "not finding the emotional maturity they're looking for in human men," making consistently attentive AI chatbots appear comparatively appealing.
Dorman's closing argument returns to the acquisition problem. What makes a person lovable, she said, is their imperfections, "your quirkiness." Those are precisely what AI-assisted presentation sands away before the first message is sent.