Sherry Turkle argues that chatbots’ “pretend empathy” may lead people to prefer them to human relationships.

Reassuring our feelings differs from confirming our version of events, but AI replies tend to blur the two.

A friend or therapist has to live with the consequences of their advice; a chatbot doesn't.

Being seen by others can be uncomfortable but can help us recognize parts of ourselves we can’t see alone.

MIT professor Sherry Turkle’s new book Artificial Intimacy explores what happens when people turn to chatbots for the kind of understanding we used to seek from each other.

In one exchange she describes, a man asks his chatbot whether his former girlfriend was right that he was emotionally unavailable. He brings a painful judgment about himself to a machine that is likely to offer a fluent, sympathetic response, instead of asking another person whose reply might be more unpredictable.

Turkle has studied our relationships with technology for decades

Today people use chatbots as companions, therapists, confidants, and romantic partners. “Pretend empathy" is the term Turkle uses to describe the sympathetic replies of the chatbots. Through her own experiments, she acknowledges just how powerful........

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