Like the TV laugh track, AI chatbots simulate connection well enough to make us forget what's real.

Warm voices and cuddly design trigger real social instincts, even when we know it's engineered.

Real conversation runs both ways; a chatbot can't be changed by you, or ever need you.

In the 1950s, a CBS sound engineer named Charley Douglass had a deceptively simple idea. What if you could pipe in pre-recorded laughter into a television broadcast so that audiences at home would feel like they were watching comedy alongside others? He built a device called the "laff box," a typewriter-sized machine loaded with recordings of different laughs, chuckles, and crowd reactions. The laugh track was born.

The laughter serves as a simple social cue, and we laugh along, even if we're sitting alone on the couch. Over 70 years later, it's the norm for sitcoms and daytime TV.

The laugh track is a simple tool. It mimics a social scenario to drive a behavior. And yet, there's something deeply disturbing about it; about using a hollow simulation to derive a desired outcome, all while bypassing the core of the experience itself. The sociologist Sherry Turkle captured this when she observed that "technology can allow us to forget what we know about life." To sit alone on one's sofa, laughing along to a prerecorded track from the TV set, is not really to laugh at all.

Laugh tracks are a trivial example, a cheap and effective trick, operating in a narrow area of human life. But now think about this in the context of AI chatbots, a far more compelling, sophisticated simulation of human sociality. We readily use the word "conversation" to describe these AI interactions because that's what they often feel like, on their surface. But in doing so, we risk losing our grip on what........

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