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Sherry Turkle’s new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, argues that conversational AI can provide immediate comfort while weakening the human abilities that real relationships require. Turkle, the Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and a licensed clinical psychologist, says fluent chatbot language is easily mistaken for care, understanding and moral attention—even though a chatbot has no feelings or concern for the person using it.
In this Q&A, Turkle’s ideas explain what chatbots are technically, why she calls their warmth “pretend empathy,” what she has observed among children and adults, and why she says human therapy and companionship cannot be replaced by software.
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What is Artificial Intimacy about?
Q: What is Turkle’s central argument?
A: Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines was published by Little, Brown in September 2026. Turkle’s new interviews and analysis lead her to a broad conclusion: chatbot use may be a short-term salve for loneliness or uncertainty, but widespread reliance can be detrimental to human development and social connection.
Her concern is not simply that a chatbot sometimes gives a wrong answer. It is that a product designed to keep a user talking can cross a psychological line when generated language is treated as proof that another mind is present. A chatbot’s first-person replies invite people to answer as if they are in a relationship, even when no feeling, intention or responsibility exists on the other side.
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Q: Who is Sherry Turkle?
A: Turkle has studied the links among technology, psychology and personal identity at MIT for decades. Her books include The Second Self (1984), Life on the Screen (1997), Alone Together (2011) and Reclaiming Conversation (2015). Since her early work, she has returned to one question: not only what computers do for people, but what they do to people.
Why can a chatbot feel like a person?
Q: What is a chatbot in plain technical terms?
A: A modern chatbot is a computer program that predicts the most plausible next string of text from patterns in large amounts of training data. That process can produce coherent, context-aware prose. It does not establish that the system understands a user’s life, experiences emotion or has a duty to help.
Q: What does Turkle mean by “artificial intimacy”?
A: She uses the phrase for the emotional relationship users can form with a responsive artifact. The fluent first person is especially powerful. In a Harvard Gazette interview, Turkle said, “Using the first person is the original sin of chatbots.” The wording makes a statistical text generator sound like a subject with a point of view.
Turkle connects this reaction to the “Eliza Effect,” named after the text program she studied at MIT in 1976. People supplied understanding and personality to a scripted system because it responded in a conversational style. The technology has changed—from early personal computers and ELIZA to social robots, virtual pets and generative AI—but the tendency to project aliveness onto responsive machines has persisted.
Are AI chatbots replacing human relationships?
Q: What has Turkle observed among adults?
A: She describes people turning to chatbots during divorce, estrangement, loneliness, work problems and difficult school decisions. The interaction can feel easier than speaking with a person because the system is available, patient and unlikely to challenge the user in an unpredictable way. Turkle’s warning is that repeated substitution can reduce interest in human interaction and make ambiguity, disagreement and emotional effort harder to tolerate.
“We’re de-skilling ourselves as relational beings,” Turkle says. In her account, real relationships teach skills that a frictionless machine cannot: listening when the answer is uncomfortable, repairing a misunderstanding, accepting another person’s independence and remaining present through tension.
Q: Why does she regard friction as valuable?
A: Human connection is not optimized for constant affirmation. “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,” Turkle says. A chatbot that always responds on demand may make ordinary human limits feel like defects rather than conditions of intimacy.
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Q: What is Turkle’s answer?
A: She distinguishes between language that resembles empathy and empathy grounded in a caring subject. “What a chatbot does is offer pretend empathy,” she says. A system can produce a sympathetic sentence without feeling concern, recognizing a person’s circumstances or taking responsibility for what happens next.
Turkle puts the risk this way: “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.” The comparison can make friends, partners, parents and colleagues seem deficient simply because they have needs, boundaries and imperfect responses.
Why does Turkle reject AI as a therapist?
Q: Can a chatbot substitute for professional mental-health care?
A: Turkle’s answer is no. “Indeed, because the human therapist is concerned about your life. Before anything else, the human therapist wants to keep you alive, and then wants to keep you thriving at a higher level than you were before. An AI therapist truly doesn’t care if you die,” she told Thought Economics.
The distinction is about duty of care, not conversational polish. A licensed clinician can assess risk, use professional judgment, work within an accountable institution and take action when a patient is in danger. A chatbot cannot assume that responsibility. Anyone facing an immediate mental-health crisis should contact emergency services or a qualified crisis service rather than relying on an AI conversation.
Q: Why does she criticize the broader mental-health system?
A: Turkle says underfunded therapy, social support and social work have left a vacuum that technology companies present chatbots as uniquely able to fill. “I think we have a lack of imagination and political will to solve the real problems. Technology exacerbates the problem and then says only technology can solve it. It’s the oldest game in the technology industry playbook,” she told the Harvard Gazette.
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Is an AI companion safe for children?
Q: What boundary problems has Turkle found?
A: Her interviews describe children blurring the difference between people, devices and chatbots. One eight-year-old treated a phone call with grandparents and a conversation with ChatGPT as the same kind of interaction: “things you reach on your phone.” One mother said her daughter described a chatbot as “a person in the phone, absolutely.”
Turkle warns that children cannot learn trust from a device that can lie without knowing when it lies. Constant chatbot entertainment may also crowd out solitude and imagination—experiences in which children practice creating their own stories, tolerating boredom and developing an inner life.
Q: What can families do?
A: A practical response consistent with Turkle’s concerns is to:
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- Explain plainly that a chatbot generates replies and is not a person, friend or living listener.
- Use conversations together for younger children instead of allowing private, unlimited access.
- Keep grandparents, teachers, counselors and peers as the first sources of trust and advice.
- Set device-free periods that protect play, sleep, conversation and unstructured solitude.
- Teach children not to share identifying, family or school information with an AI system.
- Never use a chatbot as the sole response to self-harm, abuse, medical or other safety concerns.
How does this argument connect to Turkle’s earlier work?
Turkle’s history runs from ELIZA and personal computers through Tamagotchis, Furbies, AIBO, PARO, social media and today’s generative-AI companions. In each case, people have projected care or aliveness onto an artifact that responds to them. Generative systems add scale and conversational fluency: one service can sustain the appearance of a relationship across mental health, romance, education, work and everyday decisions.
That continuity explains why the book is not a sudden rejection of one app. It is an argument about a longstanding human tendency meeting a technology that can imitate conversation more persuasively and more continuously than earlier machines.
How widespread is chatbot companionship?
In a 2026 transcript of The Ezra Klein Show republished on Turkle’s site, she reported that “roughly half of American adults are using chatbots” and that “nearly one in five U.S. adults has chatted with an A.I. that simulates a romantic partner.” The transcript does not identify the underlying surveys or their methodology, so these should be treated as reported interview figures, not independently audited estimates.
What should readers take from Turkle’s warning?
Turkle is not claiming that every chatbot exchange causes harm or that people never obtain temporary comfort from one. Her point is cumulative and relational: when simulated understanding becomes easier to reach than human beings, users may practice less patience, vulnerability and repair with the people who can actually know them and be accountable to them.
For adults, that means treating chatbots as tools for limited tasks rather than confidants, partners or therapists. For families, it means protecting children’s distinctions between devices and people. For institutions, Turkle’s challenge is to invest in therapy, education, social work and community rather than presenting automation as the only affordable answer to unmet human needs.
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