ARTIFICIAL INTIMACY

What humans lose when they form emotional attachments to AI.

Readers are lucky to hear from Turkle (Reclaiming Conversation, 2015) on the major downfalls of what she terms “artificial intimacy—AI that claims to care for us and proposes itself as a substitute for relationships with people.” A developmental psychologist and founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, Turkle is a gifted writer who, based on her four decades of research, deploys clear, accessible prose to explain how emerging technologies affect humans’ social lives and psyches. She organizes her book to follow a range of people at every stage of development, from youth through adulthood—people who have, alarmingly, moved beyond engaging AI chatbots for simple conversation or pure utility and come to rely on the technology for emotional succor. There’s a 6-year-old boy who receives care so “tender” from ChatGPT, he relies on it to tell most of his bedtime stories. There are grief-stricken grown adults turning to AI simulations of deceased loved ones, often with disturbing results. Critically, Turkle allows the developers of these technologies to explain themselves (one grief-tech founder tells the author that a user in question is “misguided” and “takes things too seriously”) before she offers her own, often frank psychological expertise to the reader. There is a toll, she asserts, to having our social and emotional developments in life “interrupted” by AI. “So much of love is about how it changes us, enlarges us,” she writes. “A chatbot user might feel good, but the connection to the chatbot is an escape from the vulnerability of human relationships.” And, she sensibly argues, real relationships with real people are still worth the effort.

A strong case for why we should resist the urge to replace human bonds with AI.