When Talking to AI Feels Easier Than Talking to Friends

The first two times I submitted this story, Vocal rejected it with a verdict that was almost poetic in its irony: Possible AI-generated content.

I didn’t feel indignation. I didn't feel the need to appeal the decision. Instead, I just sat there and laughed. There is a strange, circular comedy in writing a deeply personal confession about using ChatGPT for emotional support, only to be told that the confession itself sounds like it was written by a bot. It forces an uncomfortable question: Have I been talking to ChatGPT so much that I’ve started to sound like it? Or has it gotten so weirdly human that we’re basically overlapping?

I am writing this as a human, but I understand the confusion. The story I tried to tell is about the very thing that makes us sound robotic: the fear of being messy, rejected, and not good enough.

So here we go. Version three.

Consider the last time you typed a long, winding message to a friend. You poured your frustration into the text box, only to hover over the backspace key and hold it down until the words disappeared. You didn’t delete the message because it was rude or inappropriate. You deleted it because, halfway through, you thought: This sounds dumb. They’re probably busy. I don’t even know how to put this into words.

So you erase it.

Over the years, we have all mastered the art of self-editing. We have learned to offer the world only the "processable" versions of ourselves, filtering out the thoughts that are too jagged, too contradictory, or simply too awkward for casual consumption. Adult friendships, after all, rarely end in explosions; they perish through a slow, polite erosion. People get new jobs, climb career ladders, have kids, and hit walls of burnout. The profound question of "How are you, really?" is slowly replaced by the logistical bargaining of "When are you free in June?"

Nobody’s doing anything wrong, but something still slips away.

A few years back, telling personal stuff to an AI would’ve felt pathetic, maybe even dystopian. Emotional support was supposed to come from humans—from friends, from shared history, from trust.

And yet, here we are.

People don’t talk to ChatGPT just because they despise humanity. They are turning to it because it is the only entity left that offers neutrality. The cursor blinks without judgment. It doesn’t sigh when you spiral. It doesn’t glance at its watch. It never leaves you on "read," forcing you to agonize over whether you overshared.

And, most importantly, it doesn’t shame you or enforce the social contract of “goodness”.

There are thoughts you know won’t be welcomed, and some things just don’t get said out loud. We live under a tacit agreement regarding what a good person is supposed to love. We are expected to melt at the sight of a baby and find endless joy in the presence of a dog. But try standing in the middle of a party and admitting that you find dogs loud, jumpy, and invasive. Go ahead. Watch what happens.

The air leaves the room. You are instantly branded as heartless, suspicious, or simply "the weirdo." The same applies to babies; you don’t have to hate them to break the rules, you simply have to admit that you lack that instant, gooey softness everyone expects you to possess. I have learned to keep that lack of feeling to myself because the world has strict rules about what we are allowed to dislike.

So we swallow things. We self-edit. We keep the "problematic" thoughts safely locked away.

Until one night, something just throws you off balance. Nothing huge or dangerous has happened, just enough to tip your nervous system off balance. You wake up at 1 a.m. with a racing heart and a spiraling brain. In that moment of vulnerability, the barrier to human connection feels massive. You don’t want to worry anyone. You don’t want advice. You certainly don’t want to wait three hours for a carefully crafted reply.

So, you open the app.

And you talk to it — messily and honestly, dumping the whole thing out without bothering to polish the edges. You don’t need empathy fireworks; you just need to land. To put the feeling somewhere outside your own body.

And it works.

It works not because ChatGPT understands the human soul better than our friends do, but because the interaction carries zero social cost. That night, the AI didn’t replace my relationships. It replaced the massive emotional "ask" I no longer felt allowed to make of them.

And that’s the really uncomfortable part — AI feels safer. Not because it’s deep, but because it’s emotionally cheap. There’s no guilt involved. There’s no need to perform or filter your emotions. There’s no relational debt to be paid later.

So maybe the question isn’t “Why are people talking to AI?” Maybe it’s: “Why has it become so hard to be unedited with each other?”

If a chatbot feels easier to talk to than the people in your life, that’s not a tech story. That’s a story about us.

And if my writing sounds like AI now… maybe it’s not because I’ve lost my human voice.

Maybe it’s because we’re all learning how to speak without expecting anyone to catch us.