AI validation feels good, but it can reinforce blind spots instead of growth. #
Posted July 3, 2026 [ Reviewed by Davia Sills
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Key points
- ChatGPT can feel supportive because it rarely disagrees with us.
- Different perspectives from others help us understand situations more fully.
- Validation feels good in the moment but can limit personal growth.
- Human relationships challenge us by revealing blind spots we cannot see alone.
“The best thing about asking ChatGPT personal questions,” my teenage daughter said, “is that it doesn’t judge you. It doesn’t bring it up later. It doesn’t blame you or roll its eyes.”
Then she added:
“But I don’t ask it for relationship advice anymore.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it always tells me what I want to hear.”
I don’t enjoy hearing that I’m wrong either. Her comment made me wonder if good advice is about hearing what we want to hear or about discovering what we couldn’t see on our own.
The more I thought about it, the less this seemed like a story about AI and the more it became a story about relationships.
Relationships are complicated because they involve another human being, with different feelings, experiences, beliefs, expectations, and blind spots. We express emotions, disagree, argue, apologize, and sometimes hurt each other. We disappoint one another. We love, we get angry, we feel rejected, misunderstood, or connected. None of it is easy. At least, it isn’t for me.
Yet those difficult interactions also help us grow because they expose us to perspectives beyond our own.
Imagine I have an argument with my partner. I tell three friends what happened. One says, “You were too harsh.” Another says, “I understand why you reacted that way.” A third says, “I think you both handled it badly.” I may not like every response, but they challenge me to look at the situation from different angles.
Now imagine I ask ChatGPT. I tell the story from my perspective. ChatGPT only knows what I choose to share. Like any listener, it can only respond to the information it receives. Every story has missing pieces, blind spots, assumptions, and emotions that even the storyteller may not recognize. Our blind spots may remain invisible, not only to AI but also to ourselves.
Take a couple who are just starting a relationship. Before they leave for a party, the woman receives a text from a male friend she had stopped talking to after entering the relationship. Her partner silently interprets the message as evidence that she is having an affair. Instead of talking to her, he begins acting on his assumptions. He stops inviting her to important events, makes decisions without her, withdraws emotionally, keeps secrets, and quietly distances himself.
From her perspective, she is doing everything she can to make the relationship work. She has no idea that he is responding to a story he has created in his own mind. If she asks ChatGPT for advice, she will describe being excluded, ignored, and emotionally shut out. If he asks ChatGPT, he may describe feeling betrayed and convinced she has been deceiving him. Both stories are true to the person telling them. Neither has the truth.
The difference between AI and people is that AI does not disappoint us in the way human beings do. Researchers even have a name for this tendency: AI sycophancy, the tendency of an AI system to be agreeable or flattering, even when disagreement might be more helpful (Tseng & Liang, 2026).
AI can validate us and make us feel heard, but it cannot replace the growth that comes from real people, such as being imperfect, emotional, and difficult to understand.
We might forget our friend’s birthday. AI can’t. It doesn’t interrupt or judge us with a facial expression. It cannot walk away after an argument. Ironically, those moments are where relationships teach us patience, forgiveness, and maturity.
Artificial IntelligenceEssential Reads Think about the person who hurt you the most.
Who came to mind?
What did that relationship teach you about yourself?
What do you know now that you didn’t know then?
Does thinking about them still hurt?
Who would you be today if you had never met that person?
Sometimes our greatest teachers are not the people who loved us best, but the people who forced us to grow in ways we never expected.
Good advice is not always comforting. Sometimes it might be frustrating, embarrassing, unfair, or too brutal. Hours later, or years later, we realize it was exactly what we needed to hear.
I believe the challenge is not whether we should ask AI for advice, but whether we are willing to question the answers we hope to hear.
Trust yourself, but also challenge yourself. The next time you ask AI for advice, don’t stop at the answer you like best. Ask yourself what a trusted friend or the person you disagree with might say instead.
The people who changed our lives the most were rarely the ones who agreed with us. They were the ones who helped us see what we couldn’t see ourselves.
We learn to compromise with friends, sacrifice for partners, forgive parents, accept hard questions from therapists, and sometimes admit we were wrong. That is how we grow.
AI asks for nothing.
And perhaps that is its greatest strength and its greatest limitation.
References
Tseng, E., & A Liang, C. (2026, April). "Chat, Should I Leave Him?" Risks, Rewards, and Roles for AI in Relationship Advice. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-19).