MIT's Sherry Turkle: AI chatbots 'deskill' human empathy

Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has spent decades studying how people relate to computers, argues in a new book that conversational AI is degrading users' capacity for the messy work of human relationships.

She lays out the case in Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, out September 29, and in a podcast interview with 404 Media's Samantha Cole. 'When people turn to a chatbot, they don't have to dread the fatigue of genuine give-and-take. And they don't fear judgment or abandonment. But when we talk to chatbots, we lose the skills required to interact with humans, so chatbots start to feel like a better option,' Turkle tells the show.

Turkle points to Mark Zuckerberg's line about Americans having capacity for only three genuine friendships as evidence that companion AI is being positioned to fill the rest. 'Now that to me is a very dark endgame,' she says. Products like ChatGPT and Replika, in her framing, run on a business logic that has little to do with the user's wellbeing: 'It's a product whose fundamental directive is to keep your attention.'

She sets the shift against her own earlier work. 'In 1984, I called the computer a second self... With the digital twin, the metaphor is turned on its head. It's the agent who is in charge and imagines a version of you. Now you're the second self.'

Turkle's authority here is interpretive rather than empirical; the interview does not present new experimental data, and her weight comes from her role as founding director of MIT's Initiative on Technology and Self and a long career as a licensed clinical psychologist studying human-machine attachment. Two of the researchers in our Who's Who directory shared the piece the day it dropped.