Can You Cheat With A Chatbot? Family Law Is About To Find Out

Imagine you pick up your spouse’s tablet to check the weather and instead find a thread of romantic texts. You feel betrayed, your heart hammering in your chest. But then you notice something even more curious: this exchange occurred between your loved one and an AI companion, not a human.

It sounds like a plot from Black Mirror, but incidents like this are happening with greater frequency. “A man who goes by Mar online says he picked up his wife’s phone one night after she fell asleep, opened what looked like a harmless app, and found weeks of intimate messages between her and an AI chatbot,” according to AOL.com. “The conversations included sexual roleplay, declarations of love, and detailed fantasies about raising ‘their’ two children together. No other person was involved. The other party was an algorithm.”

Should we put ourselves in Mar’s shoes, or those of anyone else in such a situation, it’s natural to wonder: Is this really cheating? And if it is, how will it affect the future of family law? Perhaps the best place to look for these answers is Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the technology responsible for producing AI companions with such lifelike qualities.

To explore these questions, I spoke with Amy Laughlin, founder and managing partner of Laughlin Legal, a Silicon Valley family law firm operating at ground zero of the AI Age, where frontier models launched and now compete daily for dollars and the all-important superintelligence crown. “AI is moving into one of the most intimate parts of our lives: our relationships,” Laughlin told me. “People are turning to AI not just for information or to make their lives easier, but for companionship and even romance.”

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Sometimes it takes a machine to remind us of this essential truth.