Social Media Hacked Our Attention. A.I. Scares Me More.

Ms. Szalavitz is a contributing Opinion writer who covers addiction and public policy.

I was an early adopter of the internet, joining a friend’s so-called bulletin board system in 1990, before social media even existed. Though I loved it, my 24/7 enthusiasm also concerned me. I had been addicted to cocaine and heroin, which I quit in 1988 — so I was well aware of my compulsive tendencies. In a 1996 piece for The Times Magazine, I described how I had to work to control my internet use because “once you start replacing real human contact with cyber-interaction, coming back out of the cave can be quite difficult.”

That experience, and my later obsession with social media, left me wary of interacting with artificial intelligence chatbots, which........

© The New York Times