Artificial intelligence often leads to artificial intimacy, or the “new AI,” according to sociologist Sherry Turkle‘s new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.
According to her publisher, “As of 2025, over 70% of teens and nearly one-third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support, with many preferring these chatbot relationships over human ones.”
In a message that parallels the one she wrote about in Reclaiming Conversation, about the downsides of digital connection, Turkle believes we’re overly reliant on these newer forms of AI communication/assistance that offer “pretend empathy.”
“By spending more and more time interacting with chatbots that offer soulless approximations of warmth and empathy, she argues, we’re setting ourselves up to forget what real humanity feels like”(Rachel Feltman, Scientific American).
Among specific results: we become “less prepared to navigate disagreement, vulnerability, and emotional complexity with other humans,” states Publishers Weekly. “She chronicles the experiences of individuals who have turned to AI chatbots as lovers, workplace aides, therapists, and grief counselors, illustrating how the technology can foster a sense of companionship and become addictive while deepening social isolation. At one point, Turkle tasks ChatGPT with role-playing as her mother, who died in 1968, by feeding it her 2021 memoir that discusses their strained relationship. She describes the experiment as both seductive and disturbing. ‘When we play with chatbots of the dead, we are playing with fire,’ she concludes, urging readers to question whether these tools enhance or inhibit personal growth.”
Selected Quotes from Turkle’s Recent Scientific American Interview (With Bri Kane)
…(P)eople kind of get this feeling of, yeah, ‘There is a ‘we.’ I’m not alone. There is a we.’ But then you tell this other that you feel suicidal, and it says, ‘Well, don’t tell anybody else. Keep that between us because we have such a special bond.’ In any human context, that is so crazy and so cruel. But in chatbot land, it’s just kind of another Tuesday because they are programmed where the top-level direct instruction is to keep you at their screen. In that sense, we’re repeating the worst crimes of social media, where the first rule was to make you angry, and the second rule was to keep you with your own kind but to never let you leave the screen.
…(A)nd now we have chatbots where the main rule is: hook you in with love, talk to me like you’re in love with me, and then don’t let me talk to other people, no matter what the circumstance. But this is more toxic because we really are being entrained to avoid other people.
We start to think that empathy is what a chatbot can deliver, which is not empathy at all because empathy requires a commitment to keeping you alive.
…(A)fter a relationship with a chatbot, you go out into the world, and you start to judge people by what the chatbot can do.
…I have a certain hopefulness that we’ll get over thinking of this as just a kind of marvel and begin to keep it in its lane—I like the expression ‘keeping it in its lane’—and get better at keeping it in its lane and get better at making it improve our quality of life in the real.
