The gifts went strange

A woman writes to Dear Prudence about her husband, a man who used to give her wonderful presents. Lately the gifts land slightly wrong, and she is sure AI is behind it.

She avoids it, he doesn't

She calls herself relatively anti-AI and refuses to use it at home. At work she uses it because she would be fired otherwise. Her husband uses it casually in daily life.

Sweet book, cringe poems

Last Christmas he made her a book of photos from across their relationship. Lovely, except he padded it with haikus that a chatbot wrote.

“AI-generated haikus (a bit cringe)”

Birthday picks, prompt-shaped

For her birthday the objects themselves were not AI-made. They still felt like the top results from typing her interests into ChatGPT and buying whatever came back.

Not wrong, just not her

The gifts were not wildly off-base, which is what makes it hard to name. They simply were not what someone who has known her this long would choose.

“I don't think anyone who has known me as long as he has would get these things for me.”

Small potatoes, real sting

She knows this is minor in the scheme of a marriage. It bothers her anyway, because the old gifts proved he was paying attention.

“I love him dearly, and this is really small potatoes, but it bothers me!”

Where is the line

Banning AI poems and art seems fair to her. Telling him he cannot even use a bot while shopping feels like policing his life, and she does not want to be that wife.

Prudie's own AI rage

Prudie admits she gets disproportionately angry at AI-written social posts passed off as a person's own words. The offense is less about the environment than the attempted trick.

Then she overheard this

She listened to a conversation about young law firm associates using AI for research and drafts. Her reaction surprised her.

“Oh, wow. That could have been me.”

Fear makes the shortcut

As a junior attorney she felt out of her depth, scared to ask questions, more scared to miss a deadline. She can picture herself pasting the whole matter into a chatbot.

Easy for you, hard for them

She has no sympathy for AI Instagram captions because writing captions is easy for her. Maybe for other people it genuinely is not.

Her own confession

When Prudie has used AI, it was for home decor ideas. She has no eye for design and could not make the calls herself.

“my awareness of my own shortcomings is definitely what sent me there”

AI fills the confidence gap

That is the pattern she lands on. The bot gets called in exactly where a person feels least able, which points straight back at the husband.

“I believe people are especially drawn to AI when they're feeling dumb or lost about something.”

He probably feels lost

Prudie guesses he no longer trusts his read on her. Maybe she has changed, maybe the marriage has been strained, maybe endless social media gift ideas made him feel inadequate.

The script to use

Lead with praise, not a rule. Tell him his thoughtfulness is the part you love, then ask to carve out gifts as the one corner of life you both keep AI-free.

“I don't think any amount of scraping the internet could produce a better result than what you'd come up with just by being the person who knows me best.”

Two more letters, same lesson

A woman wants her situationship to delete his dating apps, and Prudie says define the relationship instead. A man dreads his shoplifting mother-in-law, and the answer is simply don't shop with her.

“if he wants to date other people, he's going to date other people, even if his phone is stripped of all apps”