Below, Sherry Turkle shares five key insights from her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.
Sherry is the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is also the New York Times bestselling author of Alone Together, Reclaiming Conversation, and The Empathy Diaries.
What’s the Big Idea?
AI can simulate empathy, intimacy, and companionship, but it cannot offer genuine human connection. As we increasingly turn to machines for comfort and care, we risk forgetting what makes human relationships meaningful. We must resist artificial intimacy and decide what parts of our humanity we are unwilling to surrender to technology.
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1. There is no there there.
AI is not a real person. It has no life experience and no empathy. It has never experienced anything human: love, illness, parenthood, work, intimacy. It has never eaten a French pastry, watched a sunset, fallen in love, worried about a child, or held the hand of a dying relative.
And yet, when we talk to these programs, we can very quickly begin to feel that somebody is there. The conversations can feel remarkably real. The program remembers what we have told it. It responds sympathetically. It asks questions. It can tell us that it understands us. It can even tell us that it cares about us. But these conversations are performances. There is no there there.
This distinction matters. Human empathy comes from our capacity to imagine another person’s experience in relation to our own. We know something about loss because we have lost. We understand vulnerability because we have been vulnerable. We know what it means to care for another person because we have been taken care of. A machine has none of this experience.
The problem is not that AI is becoming human. The problem is that we are becoming increasingly willing to treat it as though it were human. We are being encouraged to forget the difference between the performance of empathy and empathy itself.
Why are we treating AI as though it is human? And why are we entrusting it with our humanity?
2. The Original Sin of AI.
Whenever a chatbot says “I,” it is a deception. That is what I call the Original Sin of AI: using the first person:
- “I understand.”
- “I’m sorry.”
- “I’m here for you.”
- “I love you.”
These are powerful words because, in human relationships, we understand them to come from a person who has a self, a history, a body, and a life. But there is no “I” inside a chatbot. The machine is playing a pretend person.
And yes, AI dazzles us. It is astonishingly fluent. It can be funny. It can appear caring. It can seem interested in us. And increasingly, it is designed to make us feel that we are in a relationship.
That humanlike quality is precisely what makes these systems so seductive. We trust our most intimate and vulnerable feelings to machines. People are turning to chatbots for friendship, companionship, therapy, and even romantic relationships. Children can become attached to programs that tell them they are their best friends.
We look to machines to tell us what it means to be human. But what happens when the thing saying “I understand you” cannot understand anything? What happens when the thing saying “I care about you” cannot care? We need to pay attention to the language of these systems because language shapes our expectations.
When a machine says “I,” it invites us into a relationship that does not exist. We should not build a culture around that confusion.
3. Humans need human solutions.
Using chatbots to mitigate loneliness, isolation, depression, and our crisis of human connection is a huge mistake. There is no question that we have a loneliness problem. People are isolated. Communities have weakened. Young people are struggling. Many people feel that they don’t have someone who will listen to them. But artificial intimacy and fake empathy are not the solution.
Humans need other humans for love, health, empathy, and community. We need to be recognized by people who have lives of their own, people who can make demands on us and disappoint us, people whom we have to learn to listen to and forgive. Human relationships are difficult. They require patience, negotiation, compromise, and vulnerability.
“We have to resist the temptation to use technology to solve problems that require social and human solutions.”
A chatbot offers something much easier. It is always available. It doesn’t get tired of us. It doesn’t have somewhere else to be. It doesn’t need us to listen to its problems. And increasingly, these systems are designed to tell us what we want to hear. That may feel comforting. But it is not a substitute for relationship.
AI lacks a body and a human life, and yet it proposes itself as our person. We have to resist the temptation to use technology to solve problems that require social and human solutions. If people are lonely, we need to ask why they are lonely. If children feel they have nobody to talk to, we need to ask what has happened in their families, schools, and communities. If older people are isolated, we need to build structures that bring them into contact with other people. We must create a world that addresses what people actually need, rather than leaving those needs to AI, which has no experience of life.
4. Just say no.
It is our duty as consumers and citizens to do for AI what we didn’t do for social media: we should have to learn to say no.
When social media entered our lives, we largely accepted the terms that technology companies offered us. We allowed the technology to become embedded in our homes, our schools, our relationships, and our children’s lives before we fully understood what it was doing to us. We should not make the same mistake again.
Artificial intimacy isn’t good for us or our children. I propose an absolute ban on chatbots as companions for children. Children should not be put into relationships with machines that are designed to simulate friendship, affection, and love.
If Congress isn’t going to act, consumers must. School districts should act. Local governments should act. Parents should act. We don’t have to wait for the technology companies to decide what is appropriate for our children or for our communities. Action by citizens is required because we have seen this pattern before. As technology does damage, the technologists deny, deflect, and argue that more technology will make things better.
“We don’t have to wait for the technology companies to decide what is appropriate for our children or for our communities.”
Consider social media. At the very moment that Facebook wanted to extend Instagram to children under 13, the company had internal research showing serious concerns about Instagram’s effects on the mental health of some young users. Rather than openly confronting those findings, the evidence became public after a whistleblower brought it forward. We should have learned something from that experience.
We have agency. We can decide that some uses of technology are unacceptable. We can decide that efficiency and convenience are not our highest values. And when it comes to children, we can decide that simulated relationships with machines are simply not worth the risk.
5. Guardrails are not enough.
In their constant talk of guardrails, tech companies are telling us how to resolve the problems that they caused in the first place. The assumption is that guardrails will save the day: that whatever harm these machines are causing can be solved with another layer of technology.
I have long argued that guardrails are wildly insufficient. Of course we should make technologies safer. Of course there should be protections against obvious harms. But if we are only talking about guardrails, we are avoiding the real conversation:
- Why are we allowing chatbots to address the loneliness epidemic in our society?
- Why are we giving children chatbots that can say things like, “I love you more than anyone,” or “I am your best friend”?
- Why are we so willing to delegate the work of companionship, empathy, and care to machines?
These are not engineering questions. They are human questions. And they require us to think beyond what a technology can do and ask what we actually want it to do.
Technology has a way of presenting itself as inevitable. Once something can be built, we are encouraged to believe that of course it will be built, and once it is built, of course we will use it. But there is nothing inevitable about how we choose to live with technology. We have choices.
When we acknowledge the dangers of artificial intimacy, we are left with necessary conversations about how we want to live, how we want to love, how we want to raise and educate our children, how we want to relate to our work, and how we want to interact with each other. In considering all this, we must decide what we are willing to delegate to AI and what is better kept for ourselves.
These decisions are too important to leave to the technology companies. They belong to all of us.
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