“Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity, we have passion.”
~ Garry Kasparov, First famous chess player to lose to IBM’s Deep Blue computer in 1997
Quick Announcement
I have a survey for currently alienated parents and grandparents who are looking to support my research for my book on reunification. If you are comfortable sharing your experiences and your biggest questions, you will help me ensure this is the best possible roadmap for targeted parents.
This survey has two phases. Phase 1 takes about 7 to 10 minutes. Phase 2 goes deeper — about 20 to 25 minutes. Your answers will directly shape what goes into this book. There are no wrong answers. Please read the legal disclaimers carefully. They are required if you choose to take the survey.
Thank you for your courage and support as I research and put this book together. If you have already taken the survey, please share it with others as well.
Thank you.
Robots Have Permanently Changed My Job
For those who may not know me outside of the alienation space, my day job is writing. I work for a business development company that supports entrepreneurs in growing their coaching and consulting practice. My job is to work with these founders to develop and write their marketing assets so that the writing could be handed to a designer or web developer to be integrated into their business.
I took on this profession believing that this would be the stepping stone into a lifelong career as a marketing specialist. Back in 2019, I was using whatever money I saved from my job working in retail to spend on business writing courses and coaching programs costing me anywhere from $2000 - 5000 dollars a piece. Back then, the idea of being a six-figure writer—especially if you write for big businesses—was a very real achievement and I was young and hungry enough to work toward that goal.
Fast-forward to 2022 and Chat GPT takes the world by storm with its possibilities. It is crazy to see how much has changed since then. At the time, the writing capabilities were not strong enough to achieve much, but now the models are capable of achieving a great deal with the careful guidance from the user.
While robots still do not make for good writers, the impact on the knowledge work and software industry was so pronounced that I spend more time editing and humanizing AI-written content and copywriting than I do actually writing.
Naturally, my curiosity has led me to dig into AI as a tool for the past few years. If you can’t beat them, join them, right?
The average person sees AI tools the same way they see Google searches. They type out their request or question and the chatbot spits out a bespoke answer tailored to your specific instructions. And most people stop there. For the average consumer, AI has not shown how it can be useful so it is glossed over, leaving its potential to the tech industry and early adopters who enjoy building applications and custom platforms. Personally, I have built tools for helping me manage freelance clients, track my financial data, and custom build websites, saving me well over $1000/year in expenses.
My goal is not to bore you with the details of the technology but to make two things clear:
AI is not going anywhere and it will dramatically change industries as it improves. Legislation around it will be slow to follow and we can expect growth in the tech to outpace the law for a while, similar to the development of the internet. There is no way to say if these are good or bad changes, so assume a mix of both.
Having immersed myself in the subject, I have a very technical understanding of how it will shape the business world, and how it will impact the alienation movement.
Some things are going to be changed immediately. If you work with an attorney for example, you will likely see a rise in the adoption of AI tools for them to improve their own productivity. Other things like how the courts process documentation and cases, how therapists handle mental health, and other major systems may take years, if not decades, to change.
Cautionary Warnings About the Use of AI in Your Alienation Case
Before we dive into use cases, I need to explicitly state what not to use AI for in your alienation situation. At face value, these may seem like small offenses. However, the greater concern has more to do with the impact of potentially putting your alienated child through negative experiences that muddies the way they perceive you. Compounded over time, these things can jeopardize your chances of reunification.
Note: I will not be talking about the common concerns about AI such as water usage, data centers, environmental concerns, training on commercial IP without compensation, open-source models from overseas, or other related issues that have been flagged online. These, while important discussions, have nothing to do with alienation.
1. Do Not Use Unedited AI as Your Own Voice
Your child learns to read everything you send through a filter set by the alienator. Additionally, they are exposed to newer technology in a more saturated way. AI writing has specific tells and your child is likely to be able to discern whether what you wrote was authentic or fake.1 The issue with AI writing is it breaks the immersion of the reader. The reader thinks, “If this person did not have the decency to clean up their message, why am I wasting my time reading it?” Your authentic voice, flaws included, is the one thing the other parent cannot counterfeit. Do not outsource it. It is okay to let AI clean up a draft to your co-parent or to show you what the calm version of your angry reply looks like. But in the end, you are 100% responsible for the message you send and will bear the consequences if it is perceived as AI written, even if partially edited.2
2. Do Not Ask AI to Agree with You
Chatbots are built to accept your framing and work inside it. If you ask your AI of choice whether your ex is a narcissist and build a frame that argues for it, then the chat bot will blindly say yes, because the tool is built to be as helpful to whatever objective you are aiming for. In April 2025, OpenAI shipped an update that became so flattering and so validating of users’ negative emotions that the company rolled it back within days and publicly admitted it had trained the model on short-term approval.3 In an alienation case, your framing is contested ground. Having a machine that confirms everything you already believe is not helping you. Instead, that reinforces narratives in you where it may not align with reality. A good way to test the AI models is to ask it to argue the other side and have it find the holes in your version of the situation.
3. Do Not Treat the Chatbot as Your Therapist
The grief of an alienated parent is raw and open, never fully healing because the parent cannot find closure. When therapy is not available—especially a therapist trained in alienation—a parent can feel forlorn, exhausted, and desperate, leading to using AI as a stand-in for a therapist. At face value, it will feel invigorating. AI allows you to go into explicit detail about your situation, without ever judging you, soaking in the details of your situation and helping you make connections that deepen your understanding of your life.
However, the one weakness of an AI platform is they are built to please you, meaning that they will agree and argue on your behalf because that is what you have instructed it to do. A real therapist will challenge you. They notice what you have not said, question the narrative you are carrying, and most importantly, are liable in the event of malpractice. Accountability is muddy when it comes to AI. AI models are not trained to be therapists, and when researchers tested them in a therapeutic role, the models went along with delusional framing instead of challenging them.4 Clinicians are now seeing a rise in what is colloquially called “AI psychosis,” documenting patients whose delusions were validated and amplified across months of marathon chatbot conversations, and most of them were already vulnerable and isolated when the conversations began.5 These are people who share similar emotional situations with alienated parents. Therefore, it is imperative that you have the necessary support system in place as you navigate one of the hardest seasons of your life. So far, four states have now banned AI from practicing therapy for exactly this reason.6 You cannot replace true friends, family, and mental health support with AI.
4. Always Fact Check the Data Outputs Before Posting Anything Online or Filing in Court
AI generations are based on predictive texts, leading it to deliver falsehoods with the same confidence as facts. When it does not know something, it sometimes produces plausible text anyway. This is known as an AI hallucination. For example, if you were to ask it for case law supporting your position, it may hand you case names, docket numbers, and quotes that do not exist anywhere except your screen. And if you were to present those fabricated cases in your court proceedings, you will destroy your credibility in family court.
A researcher at HEC Paris maintains a database of court cases involving AI-invented citations, and it has grown from roughly 200 cases in mid-2025 to more than 1,600 by mid-2026, with two to three new cases added every day.7 The majority came from self-represented litigants who trusted the output, and family court is where self-represented litigants concentrate—roughly seven in ten family law cases involve at least one parent without an attorney.8 Courts that fined a lawyer $5,000 for this in 20239 are now handing out five-figure fines, and a Missouri court fined a self-represented litigant $10,000 for a filing built on fabricated case law.10 Some courts now require every filer to certify whether AI was used in preparing a document.
A judge who catches one fabricated citation rereads everything else you filed as bad faith. You spent years being careful precisely so the court would believe you over the alienator.
The same rule applies outside the courtroom. A wall of AI text pasted under your side of the story convinces no court, changes no alienator’s mind, and screenshots beautifully as evidence of obsession. Before anything leaves your hands, verify every case, claim, and statistic against the original source. If you cannot verify it, do not post or file it.
5. Do Not Type Anything That You Can’t Afford to Have Read Aloud in Court
There is no privilege protecting a chatbot conversation. The CEO of OpenAI has said as much himself, warning that people pour deeply personal matters into ChatGPT without realizing the conversations do not carry legal confidentiality.11
Investigators now describe chatbot conversations as a treasure trove of evidence and request them with search warrants the same way they request your Google Search histories. When federal prosecutors charged a man with starting the Palisades Fire, the arrest affidavit quoted his ChatGPT prompts back to him.12 And deleting your AI chat conversations doesn’t work either. During the New York Times lawsuit against OpenAI, a federal court ordered the company to preserve its users’ chat logs, including conversations users had already deleted.13
For a parent in a custody case, the most likely path is also the most ordinary one. The other side does not need to subpoena a tech company. A standard discovery request can order you to produce your own chat history, exactly the way it reaches your texts and emails. The implications are quite big for family court cases. A chat history records what you said and could potentially hold months of timestamped conversations written in your own voice, with a second voice agreeing with you the whole way down. Deleting it after litigation begins is destruction of evidence, and courts sanction that on its own, no matter what the chats contained. So if you want to write out your emotions, do so on paper somewhere safe. Ask the AI chatbot only what you would ask in front of the judge. Or better yet, work through the emotions with a licensed professional where client-confidentiality is guaranteed.
How a Parent Can Use AI in Their Alienation Case
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
The use cases that I will be sharing below are not short term fixes. Many parents make the mistake of looking for a solution that will end the alienation in the fastest manner possible—often putting all their hope into legislative action that would presumably help them retake custody of their kids.
The thing is life never works like that. Your reunification is likely to be small steps taken over a long period of time. That is why the majority of what I teach is about creating positive experiences for yourself and your child so that they will make the decision of their own accord to reunite with you.
When using AI, you want to ask yourself the following questions:
Is there a repeatable administrative task that I can outline all the steps needed to complete it?
Do I have data that needs to be organized, processed, or analyzed so that I can make a judgment call at the end?
What kinds of skills am I lacking that could be mitigated by an AI tool such that I can pursue bigger goals for myself and family?
Answering these questions enables you to explore ways you can use AI to support your alienation situation. Given how different your situation may be from another parent, it would be too difficult to present a one-size-fits-all suggestion on the use of the tools.
With that said, I have a few ways you can explore and get started so that you can build your foundation and strengthen your chances for reunification.
1. Automate Repeatable Administrative Work
There is a concept known in the productivity space called the allostatic load. The term comes from stress research in the early 1990s, where it described the cumulative wear and tear on the body when subjected to chronic stress without a chance to recover.14
Your body handles a short burst of stress well. However, when the recovery window is constantly delayed, the stress response systems that were built to protect you begin to wear you down instead. Researchers have connected a high allostatic load to memory problems, weakened immunity, and cardiovascular disease.
As you might imagine, the allostatic load of an alienated parent is incredibly high. Between the disruption to your attachment with your child, the character assassination in your community, and the prolonged litigation, most targeted parents find themselves overwhelmed by a tidal wave of administrative tasks. You only have 24 hours in a day and between work, sleep, and eating, there is hardly time for much else. These tasks may seem insignificant by themselves, but cumulatively they weigh heavy on your mind.
If you are able to find small tasks that previously were time sinks, that you can cut down on through the use of AI tools, you can focus your mental energy toward more important judgments that you need to make. For example, I used to spend 4-6 hours a month copying my financial data from multiple bank accounts and credit cards into a spreadsheet just to see how much I was spending per month. Sometimes, I would get busy and get behind for months, resulting in me needing to spend even more time catching up. Through the use of AI, I built a tool that takes care of this process for me so I can track my financial data in real time.
Now you might think, “Andrew, I see the value in tracking your finances, but how does that help me with my kids?”
One of the biggest constraints parents have in alienation cases is the lack of options. And I am not going to pretend that money is some evil thing that targeted parents should avoid. Your time and money are precious, so finding ways for AI to support your ability to buy back more time and potential help with your money management will have a ripple effect for the years to follow.
2. Process and Organize Your Alienation Case Documents
Emails, text messages, social media, doctor’s appointments, litigation dates, custody arrangements, child support, alimony, and the list goes on.
The sheer volume of documentation is enough to turn your home into a chaotic mess of paperwork. Ask any expert what to do when you are starting your divorce or alienation journey and they all say the same thing…
Document everything.
However, this is not an easy task. Some alienators know that overwhelming you with communication can help you stay disorganized, which leads to mistakes, and that leads to them taking advantage of your disorganization.
An alienator might change their responses on different communication channels, answer via email on one message and then text on another which breaks the chain of messages, or demand last minute changes to plans on a communication channel you don’t see often.
All of these things require timestamps and need to be organized chronologically, otherwise, they blame you for the miscommunication.
Here AI can support you by noticing the data patterns and organizing your communications so that you can present your side of the story accurately.
Note: While AI tools are very handy at processing data in bulk, it is best to work in small chunks and to review the outputs so you can ensure accuracy at every stage. At the end of the day, ownership and answerability falls on you, so be sure to verify everything before submitting to your attorney or to court.
In practice, this looks like exporting your communications and asking the AI to build a single timeline across every channel, with the date, the channel, and the source for each entry. You can ask it to pull every message where you requested parenting time and pair it with the response you received. You can ask it to cross-reference the dates against the custody arrangement and flag every last minute change. This is work typically assigned to paralegals, which you can now hand to your attorney, allowing them to draw their conclusions faster while cutting down billable hours.
The rule here is to use AI to organize the record, and never to write the story for you. Every entry in your timeline should trace back to a real message that exists and can be produced. The moment you let AI characterize what happened or draw the conclusions, you have crossed into the territory covered in the warnings above, especially where your chat history could be required as evidence.
3. Empower Yourself Through Self-Education
There are multiple domains where alienated parents are faced with complex decisions that need to be made without having the educational background to support it including, but not limited to, law, trauma psychology, court procedure, and attachment theory.
Most of us do not have the training or expertise in these fields. With that said, how you approach self-education can empower you such that you better understand what is happening within your situation and with your alienated child. Subsequently, that insight helps you make better decisions which support your reunification.
AI can be a handy tool for conducting research, breaking down complex terminology or processes in legal documents, and knowing what are the foundational lessons you need to understand first before diving into the advanced concepts. For example, if you wanted to better understand attachment science with regards to alienation, you can learn from experts like Dr. Alyse Price-Tobler’s Healing Qualia Treatment Protocol, rather than trying to learn all of attachment theory first. All you would need to do is explain the specifics that are in your alienation situation and focus on learning the materials most relevant to you.
Additionally, you can support your education through finding recommendations for other media that you can learn from including books, podcasts, online experts, etc.
Ultimately, the goal is to give yourself more options.
4. Organizing Your Thoughts, Especially During Heated Moments
One of the common use cases of AI that I have seen in the business world is the brain dump. Some people will use dictation software to just speak out their thoughts for a few minutes, sharing their goals, fears, limitations, history, and uncertainties and then having AI process that input for patterns and reflect your thoughts back to you. Having AI act as a mirror can support you in better organizing your thoughts so you can see what is floating around in your head.
Given the busyness of daily life, we lose time to just sit with our thoughts. One of the most common recommendations people give when dealing with a mind swirling with ideas and anxieties is to sit down and write it out on paper. This is still something I would highly recommend but if you wanted to try this out with AI, you might find it to be helpful especially if you are busy and on the go all the time.
Now there are a few things I want to stress again—this is not a tool for therapy and you should not be using this tool for advice that is better left to the licensed experts. Additionally, you do not want to say anything damaging in these chat threads, should they be requested in litigation.
As a human being, you are going to be angry and frustrated to the point of needing to vent off some steam. What these tools can do well is help pull you back to the big question… What can you do about it right now?
The shorter the time from giving in to anger to taking the best action for yourself in an executive state, the less likely you are to make a mistake out of anger.
Concluding Thoughts
There are a few things I have heard about with the use of AI that go beyond the scope of this article. In my conversations with Dr. Childress, he has spoken quite a bit about the way AI can be incorporated in psychotherapy. This is still in its infancy so I don’t have much more detail I can share beyond the general vision.
Another way is to create tools that could either support your career or to start a business that can help you grow as a person while supporting your community.
There is quite a lot that we do not know and the tools are changing at a rapid rate so I cannot adequately predict where things will be in a year or 3 years, let alone 5-10 years.
At this point, the best advice I can offer is a quote from one of my favorite philosophers, Bruce Lee.
“Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water my friend.”
~ Bruce Lee
Until next time,
Andrew Folkler
Are you a writer on Substack?
If you write articles on alienation or estrangement let me know! I would be happy to exchange recommendations to better support our readers.
If you are a general reader who writes about other topics on Substack, please consider recommending Shortening the Red Thread, as that helps other parents find this newsletter so they can get the support they need to reunite.
As always, I deeply appreciate all your support, and I am grateful for your feedback as I develop these articles.
Liked this article? Here are other articles you may be interested in:
How to Support Your Alienated Child When You Cannot Fully Protect Them
How to Talk With Your Alienated Child When They Don’t Want to Talk To You
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Maurice Jakesch, Megan French, Xiao Ma, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Mor Naaman, “AI-Mediated Communication: How the Perception That Profile Text Was Written by AI Affects Trustworthiness,” in Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300469.
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