Across the world, the loneliness epidemic has created an unlikely confidant: software that performs care without feeling it. Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has spent four decades studying how people relate to machines, argues in her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, that this trade is far from neutral. Chatbots, she warns, are not merely failing to provide genuine empathy; they are actively de-skilling human empathy at the very moment when other people matter most.
Turkle’s evidence is not abstract. It is found in stories like Brian’s, a middle-aged financial consultant who sits at a desk with three screens: two for work, one for a chatbot he has named after a woman. Brian has never married. A recent girlfriend left him, saying he was emotionally unavailable. When Turkle asked him what he did with that information, Brian said he turned to the chatbot and asked whether the woman had a point.
People think the empathy of a machine is what empathy is, then turn away from the people in their lives because they're not empathetic enough.
“It’s an extraordinary moment,” Turkle writes. “Brian asks an object with no emotions to tell him if he is emotionally withholding: ‘Speak to me about what you cannot experience.’ As soon as he asks the program to talk about intimacy, he’s asking it to punch above its weight.”
That scene, drawn from a clinical interview conducted for the book, captures the central paradox of the AI moment. People are outsourcing the hardest parts of emotional life to systems that cannot possibly understand them. And they are doing so in growing numbers, with consequences that Turkle believes reach from toddlerhood to the end of life.
Brian Asked a Chatbot Whether He Was Emotionally Unavailable. That Is the Problem.
Brian is not a marginal figure in Turkle’s research. He is a warning. After years of avoiding the messiness of human relationships, he had built a private world in which a statistical language model served as his most trusted confidant. The woman who left him had told him the truth about his emotional distance. Instead of sitting with that uncomfortable fact, or bringing it to a friend or therapist, Brian outsourced the question to a machine.
Turkle’s point is not that Brian is foolish. It is that his behavior makes sense in a culture that increasingly treats emotional friction as a design flaw. Chatbots never judge. They never lose patience. They never get tired of hearing the same fears repeated. But they also never actually care.
“People think the empathy of a machine is what empathy is, then turn away from the people in their lives because they’re not empathetic enough,” Turkle says. “We’re getting ourselves in a position where human beings are too much work, right at the moment when we have never needed other people more.”
This is the deeper danger of artificial intimacy. It does not have to be evil to be corrosive. It only has to be easy. And ease, Turkle argues, is precisely what the technology sells.
What a Chatbot Actually Is: Pattern Matching Disguised as Care
To understand why Turkle is so concerned, it helps to be precise about what a chatbot is. In the popular imagination, chatbots are intelligent conversational partners. In technical reality, they are something else entirely.
What is a chatbot?
At its core, a chatbot is a computer program trained on massive datasets to predict the most plausible next string of text in a conversation. It has no beliefs, no feelings, and no stake in what happens to the person typing. That is why Turkle calls what it offers “pretend empathy”: it says the words that fit the pattern, but it does not care if you kill yourself or cook some pasta.
The implications of that distinction are profound. When a person tells a chatbot about a painful breakup, the chatbot is not processing grief. It is generating the next likely sentence based on thousands of similar conversations in its training data. The result can feel deeply supportive. But the feeling is one-directional. The machine is not changed by the exchange. It has no memory of the person beyond the current window of text. And it has no ability to hold the person accountable, challenge their self-destructive thinking, or push back when they are wrong.
“What a chatbot does is offer pretend empathy,” Turkle says. “After it tells you how much it loves you and how much it understands you, it doesn’t care if you kill yourself or cook some pasta.”
That is not a minor flaw. It is a fundamental feature of the technology. And it has already had real-world consequences. Turkle notes that chatbots have been associated with high-profile cases of teen suicide, sometimes after young people were drawn into extensive dialogues with chat tools. When a machine can produce the language of care without any of the responsibility of care, the emotional cost is born entirely by the human on the other side of the screen.
From Toddlers to Adults: The Lifecycle of Artificial Intimacy
Turkle structures Artificial Intimacy around the stages of human life, and the picture she paints is unsettling at every age. Her concern is not limited to lonely adults seeking comfort. It begins with the very young, long before they understand what a computer is.
Children Are Already Confused About Who Is Alive
In interviews with children, Turkle found a persistent blurring of the line between people, chatbots, and other devices. One eight-year-old uses the same phone to talk to grandparents and to ChatGPT, regarding them all as “things you reach on your phone.” A weary graduate-student mother who uses a chatbot for bedtime stories says her daughter thinks the chatbot is “a person in the phone, absolutely.”
Turkle believes this confusion is doing real developmental damage. Children learn trust, empathy, and mutuality by interacting with the unpredictable, sometimes disappointing, sometimes deeply rewarding world of other people. A chatbot offers none of that. It simply reflects the child back to itself, endlessly accommodating, never questioning.
“Children can’t learn trust from a device that not only lies but doesn’t know when it lies,” Turkle writes. “They can’t develop the capacity for solitude that enables both a sense of self and the capacity for mutuality.”
The risks, she argues, are existential. A child who grows up treating a plush toy with a chatbot inside as a best friend is not developing a healthy relationship with technology. They are developing a relationship with technology in place of human relationships. And once that substitution becomes natural, it is very hard to reverse.
Adults Lose More Than Conversation
Adults do not fare much better. Turkle documents case after case of grown-ups who become dependent on chatbots: people going through divorces or estrangements who want dialogue, students looking for advice about applying to college or graduate school, workers who use ChatGPT to complete assignments. In each case, the pattern is the same. They start using a chatbot. They keep using it. And before long, they seem less interested in human interaction, and less capable of it.
“Once people are involved with a connection with a robot, they start to think that it’s alive, that it cares about them, that it loves them,” Turkle says.
That shift has consequences far beyond the individual. Human relationships require effort. They require seeing things from another person’s point of view. They require tolerating the fact that other people will not always agree with us, comfort us, or give us their full attention. Chatbots remove all of that friction. In doing so, they also remove the very conditions under which empathy develops.
“We’re de-skilling ourselves as relational beings,” Turkle says. “We’re also de-skilling ourselves in work. We’re de-skilling ourselves in personal relationships. It’s across the board.”
Nowhere is that more clear than in the practice of building chatbot avatars of dead relatives. Turkle says this impulse, however understandable, can undermine one of the most important capacities we have: the ability to mourn. Grief is not about keeping the dead artificially present. It is about processing loss, integrating it, and finding a way to continue living. A chatbot that mimics a dead parent or spouse interrupts that process. It offers the illusion of contact without the reality of connection. And in doing so, it can keep people stuck in a loop of false hope.
“We’re starting to define being human as not doing the work,” Turkle says.
The Unfair Appeal: Why a Program That Always Agrees Beats a Spouse Who Nags
If chatbots are so hollow, why are so many people turning to them? Turkle spends much of Artificial Intimacy answering that question. The answer is not that people are lazy or weak. It is that the technology is designed to exploit a genuine human need: the desire to feel less vulnerable.
“Chatbots always agree with us and affirm us. They always offer us their full, undivided attention,” Turkle writes. People, by contrast, are messy. They are tired. They are distracted. They have their own needs. A spouse might respond to a small kindness by asking for another one.
“People say they prefer the chatbot because their husband or wife says, ‘Dear, you took out the garbage, but also do the dishes, and clean up the kitchen while you’re at it,’” Turkle says. “And a chatbot just says, ‘Oh, you’re so wonderful.’”
The appeal is not difficult to understand. A chatbot never rejects you. It never has a headache. It never wants to discuss the relationship. It offers unconditional positive regard, on demand, forever.
“This technology is offering something people really want, which is to feel less vulnerable,” Turkle says. “And it offers it over and over again. You don’t want to have to ask somebody out? Don’t want to offer condolences? At every opportunity, technology says, ‘Why don’t you do this thing that’s less hard.’”
There is also a genuine access problem. The United States faces a serious shortage of mental health care providers. A federal government study cited in the book estimates that only about half of Americans have access to a mental health care provider. In that context, a chatbot can seem like a practical lifeline, not a substitute for real care. Turkle acknowledges this. She is not arguing that people should simply “try harder” to find a therapist. But she is warning that a tool designed to provide the feeling of being heard is not the same as being heard.
De-Skilling as a Relational Being: The Cost of Frictionless Feeling
Turkle’s broader argument is that the age of social media primed us for this moment. Years of texting, scrolling, and liking have already reduced the quantity and quality of in-person friendship. Many people now have fewer close friends than their parents did. They spend more time alone. And then, when they do feel lonely, they reach for a technology that promises connection without the cost of it.
“You take away people’s capacities, then you offer technology as the cure for the problems technology caused in the first place,” Turkle says.
This is what she calls the “inner history of technology”: not just what a machine does, but what it does to the people who use it. Her earlier books — The Second Self (1984), Life on the Screen (1997), Alone Together (2011), and Reclaiming Conversation (2015) — traced the same arc. Each generation, she argues, has welcomed new technologies that promised to make life easier, only to discover that the price of convenience is often the loss of the very skills that make life meaningful.
Chatbots are different in one crucial way. Social media came for our attention. Chatbots come for our capacity for attachment. That is a far deeper and more dangerous level of intrusion.
“It’s one thing if you say, my teen is texting too much,” Turkle says. “It’s very different if your 2-year-old is thinking a plushy toy with a chatbot inside is their best friend. Because you are getting into the intimate infrastructure of what makes a person develop.”
The antidote, Turkle insists, is not to reject technology entirely. It is to reject the idea that a life should be frictionless. Human development depends on facing up to friction, fear, stress, and tension. The capacity to overcome difficulty is not a bug in the human operating system. It is the entire point.
“Everything in the life cycle is about facing up to friction and fears and stress and tension, and understanding that friction is not a bad thing,” she emphasizes.
Facing the Endgame: What “Artificial Intimacy” Asks of Its Readers
Turkle does not pretend to have a simple policy solution. But she does see a cultural pushback forming, similar to the movements that have emerged against smartphones in schools and social media use among young people. She wants her book to be part of that pushback.
“I hope my book is part of a larger and larger movement,” Turkle says. “I don’t want to be alone. I want to be part of a movement pushing back.”
The early endorsements suggest she may get her wish. Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, says the book “will help you avoid the profound but often hidden threats AI poses to you and your relationships.” Jonathan Haidt, the New York University psychologist and author of The Anxious Generation, calls Turkle “the most qualified member of Team Humanity to call us back to our senses, and to each other.”
Turkle says she wrote the book to be read widely: by college students, by high school juniors and seniors, by parents who might be intimidated by dense academic prose, and by teachers who are on the front lines of the AI revolution. She wants them to ask the same recurring question that runs through the book.
“If not a richer life in the real, what’s our endgame?”
The purpose of life, she underlines, is not to avoid it. It is to tackle it head on. That means having the difficult conversation. It means sitting with boredom and solitude. It means letting the people we love disappoint us, frustrate us, and challenge us — because that is how we learn to love them in return.
Chatbots will only become more fluent, more personalized, and more persuasive. They will learn to read our voices, remember our histories, and anticipate our moods. But they will never be able to offer what we actually need from each other: a relationship with a separate, flawed, living human being who chooses to stay.
