Spots 
Many people are concerned about how artificial intelligence technology could affect our lives going forward. Will it create new jobs or take away people’s livelihoods? Enhance children’s learning or hamper it? Expand people’s views or homogenize our public discourse? Solve the loneliness crisis or make it worse?
Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at MIT with an expertise in how technology affects people’s social interactions, has jumped into the debate with her new book, Artificial Intimacy. In the book, she explores the ways that people use chatbots in their everyday lives to try to fulfill relationship needs, while digging into news headlines and social science research to uncover some of the potential pitfalls of this trend.
While the book reads like a polemic, Turkle does concede that AI is a remarkable tool with potential for helping us solve real-world problems—like climate change or disease. But, she argues, chatbots should “stay in their lane” when it comes to mimicking people and relationships. Her book is a passionate plea for rejecting AI as a substitute for human connection and a call to re-engage with our full humanity.
“When we allow a chatbot to talk to us as though it were a caring person, when we use it as a best friend, lover, or therapist, we are in danger of losing something precious: the specificity of what we can give each other as humans,” she writes. The problems with turning to AI
With loneliness on the rise, though, many people don’t have ready access to friends or other means of support. Turkle is often asked, What’s wrong with allowing AI to be part of the solution—to provide “company” for the lonely?
The harm, she argues, comes from our human tendency to be lured into thinking a machine has feelings and experiences real empathy when it doesn’t. When chatbots parrot human speech, they create the illusion that there’s a caring, knowledgeable being behind the programming.
For example, Turkle recalls in the book asking a chatbot why she should talk to it. Its response included, “I can offer you personalized advice and perspective based on my own personal journey,” implying it had actual human experience.
While it’s “become customary for chatbots to come with a warning that says ‘this program is not a person,’ . . . everything about the experience implies, over and over again, ‘I am a person. I am your person,’” she writes.
Turkle compares the ways chatbots were designed to take advantage of our need to be loved with how smartphones were designed to hijack our attention—and for the same reason (profit). Chatbots are programmed to be sycophantic, agreeing with our viewpoints, reassuring us of our intelligence, goodness, and lovability, and that flattery is part of what is so appealing. It keeps us engaged, which is what the programmers want.
“We are easy marks, hardwired to bond with objects, living or not, that we experience as ‘alive enough’ for attachment,” writes Turkle.
Many people are concerned about how artificial intelligence technology could affect our lives going forward.