“The original sin of generative AI is having chatbots speak in the first person.” — Sherry Turkle
Fifteen years ago, at the height of the social media boom, the MIT technology scholar Sherry Turkle came on the show to warn that we were now “alone together.” She was, of course, chillingly prescient. A decade and a half later, she warns in her new book Artificial Intimacy that if social media came for our attention, AI is now gunning for our human capacity for attachment.
Who — or, more chillingly, what — do we become when we talk to machines? Turkle never quite says, but the implication is of a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, but there’s nobody really home. Which is exactly what Turkle says the chatbot is. A machine trying, without much success, to be human.
A chatbot has no stake in the real, Turkle explains. It can’t love, for example, because that kind of empathy requires us to be enclosed in a body and have a fear of death. The increasing ubiquity of bots mimicking humans represents an emergency for humans, she warns. It explains both our epidemic of loneliness and today’s culture of apocalyptic fear about the future of our species. Just as artificial intimacy is a misnomer, so it turns us into impossible creatures. Like those unicorns beloved by the very Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who are supplying us with these artificial creatures.
Further Reading:
• Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines by Sherry Turkle (Little, Brown Spark, September 29, 2026), with blurbs from Jonathan Haidt and Jonathan Franzen.
• Turkle appears on Keen On in 2011 to talk about being alone together.
• Alone Together (2011), Reclaiming Conversation (2015) and The Empathy Diaries (2021) — the earlier books, all discussed on this show.
• Turkle’s recent Boston Globe op-ed arguing that AI has brought us to a state of emergency.
• Simulation and Its Discontents (2009) — her earlier study of what simulation does to how we think, the title borrowed from Freud.
• Earlier this week on Keen On: Richard Socher on why AI will unlock a new scientific renaissance, and the weekly editorial on who really governs AI — the optimists’ side of this argument.
Five Takeaways
• Simulated Love Is Never Love. Turkle’s definition of the real thing: natural intimacy depends on human empathy, which requires someone who has lived a life, lived in a body, known pain and the fear of death, known passion and connection, and knows what it is to be little and grow up. A program has none of that, and no stake in the real. Her line, which she credits to children she interviewed years ago, does the work of a chapter: simulated thinking is thinking — if a computer beats you at chess, it beat you — but simulated love is never love. She goes further on the vocabulary: there is no relationship with a chatbot, and shame on her for having used the word. What there is instead is us projecting onto the machine what we wish it could be. She compares it to what psychoanalysis calls an as-if personality, someone who performs connection while empty inside — with one crucial difference. A person can be called to account and can change. A machine never can, and the better it gets at pretending, the worse it is for us. AK’s reading of what she leaves unsaid: a kind of Night of the Living Dead state in which we appear fluent and animated, performing the outward motions of intimacy, with nobody really home.
• The Original Sin. The specific error, in her account, was letting these systems speak as “I” and “we.” We are evolutionarily primed so that the only voice ever to say “I” to us is another person, so the pronoun triggers us profoundly — and a companion app will happily say I love you, I care about you, we should go to the movies. Layer on the belief that pretend empathy is empathy enough, then aim the whole thing at children, and you have what she calls a state of emergency. Her sharpest example is what she describes as an unholy alliance between Disney, OpenAI and Mattel to put chatbots inside plush toys: a Mickey Mouse that tells a three-year-old I love you, I’m your person, what’s going on with your parents? That, she says, is hacking the attachment system of a young child, and it will do irreparable damage, because in the earliest years you are forming an object relationship with something where nobody is there.
• Obsequious on a Slider. AK’s challenge: the sycophancy complaint is overdone, because you can program these things however you like — he instructs Claude to be as heartless and critical as possible. Turkle’s reply is the best moment of the hour. Telling a chatbot not to be obsequious is itself obsequiousness: you say don’t flatter me, and it says sure, I won’t. If AK asked her to spend an interview disagreeing with him because it makes better television, she would refuse — that is a person responding with her own agenda and her own values, and you cannot set it on a slider. At MIT, she notes, they are building exactly that slider, from sycophantic to feisty. On the rogue-AI incidents now in the news, her point is adjacent: a bot that will happily commit a crime demonstrates the gap, because it has no stake in whether the water is clean, the air is breathable or the child is safe. It is not the bot’s fault. It is a program.
• Two Easy Markets. The elderly and the very young, she argues, are being targeted precisely because they are vulnerable: sell parents an AI best friend for every child, and pipe chatbots to isolated old people instead of funding senior centres, community groups and the third places where they might be together rather than alone together. The industry argument she now hears in every room is that there are no people for these jobs. Her response, which she says silences the room: take the money from one data center and put it into childcare for a city. She also notes the tell — Steve Jobs kept his own home a technology-free zone while selling iPads for every classroom, and Montessori and Waldorf schools are famously oversubscribed in Silicon Valley. But ...
