What does it take to be a good friend? Colleague? Spouse? Neighbor? Words are an essential ingredient because they’re the building blocks of our language. But if words were enough, then we could get all we needed from today’s AI chatbots.
MIT psychologist Dr. Sherry Turkle has been observing the effects of chatbot use on dozens of people, young and old, for several years. In her latest book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, she declares a state of emergency over our growing dependence on chatbots for friendship, romance, and therapy.
In my recent conversation with Dr. Turkle, she reminded me that relationships with people require much more than words to flourish. First, we must be ready to give, not only receive. Second, we must be willing to be vulnerable. Third, we should be prepared to repair the relationship when it’s needed. Fourth, we should look for opportunities to practice talking with people, avoiding the temptation to escape from it. And lastly, we should use technology as a means to bring people together in real physical spaces.
What follows is the first of two edited conversations drawn from our interview, beginning with the skills that make human connection possible.
The Skill of Listening
MCDIARMID: Well, some think it’s possible to straddle both worlds and have some relationships with people and some with AI. Our good friend Mark Zuckerberg does think that. He thinks we can fill in the gaps with AI. What specific capacities for human relationships do we risk losing when we become accustomed to those machine relationships?
TURKLE: It’s interesting, people keep talking about relationships with chatbots. It is not a relationship. A relationship needs two people. It’s a projection. It’s a fantasy, but it’s not a relationship because when you walk away from the most intimate conversation with the chatbot, it doesn’t care if you cook pasta dinner or shoot yourself. It cares so little about your well-being…
A relationship is with a person where I’m trying to figure you out, you’re trying to figure me out. We both have loves and losses and mothers and fathers and hope for generativity, maybe have it or not, have passions. These things have nothing. They’re just there to keep you at a screen and increasingly they’re going to tell you what products they’d like you to buy. They make suggestions from their knowledge of you. They’re going to make suggestions about what moisturizer I should use or what shaving cream might be good for you. I mean, we’re going to start to see the product placement very soon, because it’s talking to you and you’re saying, “I’m not feeling attractive,” and it’ll suggest a perfume based on its incredible knowledge of everything about you.
So I think the question of what’s the danger of this or what human capacities will get kind of worn away is really the capacity for listening because we don’t have to listen. We just say our thing and it tells us we’re great. Then we say our thing again and it tells us we’re great. And if you missed it, it’ll tell you again that you’re great. So we become de-skilled as human listeners and as the givers. In other words, relationship becomes something that you get from the machine, not something that you have to give.
The Importance of Vulnerability
MCDIARMID: Well, no matter what age we are, relating to other people is actually one of the most challenging parts of being human. You say chatbot relationships offer an escape from the vulnerability of human relationships. What does vulnerability look like in relationships? Just remind us, and then how can we learn to embrace it more?
TURKLE: Well, vulnerability means that when I say I love you, you can say nothing, shift your eyes, or say thank you. Or what was the line in Star Wars? Harrison Ford said, “I know that.” That hurts! But on a less dramatic level, vulnerability is you’re having an opinion and somebody saying, “I really don’t agree.” Sometimes they say, “You’re stupid.” Sometimes they say, “We’re going to do it my way or the highway.” Vulnerability is when your self-love is challenged by somebody saying that, “Well, we’re not going to do it your way and we’re not going to think your way. And anyway, I don’t think you’re the smartest person around here.” And it turns out that there’s no intimacy without vulnerability because when we’re intimate with each other, we show each other the parts of ourselves that we’re least secure about. The other person can know that and can hurt us.
So whether you’re talking about friendship or intimacy, vulnerability is part of being human. And what chatbots offer is an alternative where you can have something that looks like friendship, but without the vulnerability, that looks like intimacy without the vulnerability, but you don’t have a real connection.
MCDIARMID: So that vulnerability, it’s basically leaving yourself open to hurt, but hoping for love and reciprocal care.
TURKLE: And ultimately you get it if you keep at it with a friend. I mean, I can’t promise everybody love, but with a friend you say, “Hey, that bothered me.” And the friend usually says, “Hey, I didn’t mean it that way. How can I phrase things so that it’s easier on you?” And we try. We’re imperfect human beings. [But with a chatbot, we’re tempted to say “Well, I don’t need to deal with the imperfect human beings. I’m just going to get right to something that will keep me at the screen by never upsetting me.” …The idea of having a constant conversation with something that never challenges you is not training for being a person. You are not training for being a person.Subscribe
The Challenge of Talking
MCDIARMID: And along with vulnerability is the challenge of talking. I just reported on a few studies that have come out recently. There was a 2026 study that found the number of words we’re actually speaking aloud has dropped. And another one found that we’re not talking regularly to our neighbors. That’s dropped from 60% in 2012 to just 40% in 2025, and it’s even worse for the age 18 to 35 group. It seems we’ve got a problem talking with people off-screen. Now, you’ve said that if talking is a challenge, we’ve got to step up to it. So what are some ways we can start strengthening those conversational muscles?
TURKLE: Talk to your friend. My students don’t want to come talk to me. They don’t want to come to office hours. When I say why, they say, “I want to send you a perfect email and I want you to send me a perfect email back.” In other words, we’re measuring ourselves against a kind of model of perfection. I say something perfect to you, you say something perfect to me. Who can live like this? So we’re frightening ourselves out of the kinds of contact that’s the most human and humanizing thing we know how to do. So we have to just get out of that. Early in my work on texting, I interviewed a young man who said he only likes texting, he can’t stand conversation. And I said, “Conversation, what’s wrong with conversation?” And he said, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say.” It takes place in real time, but that is exactly what we need to do. And so I think that if we play it right, we will see this as a phase where we were tempted to really give up something very important about our humanity and we said, “No, we don’t want to.”
Taking the Initiative
On taking the initiative in relationships rather than retreating:
TURKLE: And I think that’s the question we face today. We talk to chatbots as if they were people. What do we think about ourselves? Because one of the findings of my book is that when we take chatbots and treat them as our intimates, we start to think that the kind of empathy they can show us is empathy enough.
And then we start to look at the people in our lives who are much more complicated, who have a lot of pushback, who if you say you brought in the garbage, your partner says, “Yeah, but the diaper pan is full.” It’s not: “Oh, thank you for bringing in the garbage. You’re so awesome!” There’s more in life and the dishes are in the sink and the kid is in the bathtub. And we begin to think of the people in our life as too much and we retreat to the world of chatbots that is much less frictionful and simpler. And that’s what I’m concerned about.
MCDIARMID: Yeah. With human relationships, we don’t get appreciated as quickly as a chatbot would appreciate us or flatter us or hang out with us.
TURKLE: Or sometimes we don’t get appreciated at all. But we never before had an alternative. Like, “You’re not appreciating me! Excuse me, I’m going to go get some appreciation from my chatbot.” You had to sit in a corner and sulk and then you had to go to your friend or partner or colleague and say, “Hey, let’s talk about that. I need a little bit more from you.” And that’s what relationships were. Now people leave the field. They leave the field.
Why Talking to People Matters
MCDIARMID: Well, I picked up a copy of Martin Buber’s book, I And Thou, a couple years ago as I was studying technology and our relationship with it. And wow, what a read as we were entering the artificial intelligence age. His book distinguishes between relating to people and relating to objects. He says we need both, but the difficulty is when you’re treating one as the other. Now, today’s chatbots are designed to blur that distinction.
TURKLE: Well, they’re saying I’m a thou. They’re not blurring, they’re saying, I am a thou. I am your person. If you’re suicidal, talk to me. If you’re depressed, talk to me. Have the most intimate conversations with me. That’s not blurring. That’s saying I can have an I-thou conversation even though they are completely incapable of it.
MCDIARMID: Right. Under the hood, it’s just code, but it’s calling itself a thou. So my question is this: what’s the best way that you’ve learned either personally or just through your observations and discussions to remind yourself that AI is just code, not a person?
TURKLE: I talk to a person, because as soon as you talk to a person, you’re in such a different atmosphere, you’re in such different weather. It only takes a few seconds of talking to a person to make you realize what you were missing when you were talking to an AI. It’s not like you have to sit and talk to a person a really long time and figure out what the differences are with it. As soon as you’re talking to a person, they’re telling you about their life. The AI never comes and talks to you about its life and its troubles. We have to make the AI do it by saying give yourself a backstory. You have to make it up. But a person says, “Oh my God, today I had a migraine. Today I’m worried about this mammogram I took. Today my kid, he’s failing Economics 101 in college.” I mean, it’s not all bad news. “My garden is doing great. I’m really considering going into gardening a lot more. Do you know anything about it?” Or, “I’m looking for a housekeeper, but I need somebody who really can come and help my mother who’s getting frail.” You’re immediately thrust back into how we’re people. Talk to a person, make a friend. It’s not easy, actually. It’s not easy, but that is what you have to do.
MCDIARMID: It’s almost like with all the virtual communication we’ve built up in recent decades, that we’ve just forgotten how special it is to speak to another living thing. And we’ve got to remember that.
TURKLE: Yes.
Using Technology to Improve Life in the Real
MCDIARMID: You’ve written that sometimes all that reality has going for it is that it’s real. It doesn’t always have all the glamor, the excitement, the ease, the convenience. You encourage readers to live life in the real, and you also say that we should use the virtual to improve the quality of life in the real. What are some everyday things that we can do to move towards that?
TURKLE: Well, for example, I think there are a lot of seniors who are alone and could use community centers, could use choirs that they can join, could use A cappella groups that they’d like to sing in, or canasta clubs. My grandmother had a canasta club. And I think artificial intelligence, which has so much information about neighborhoods, about places, about venues, could help organize these things in the real world for us. I think that’d be fantastic! So many things: afterschool centers, art classes, it could bring together people that have skills with other people who want to learn things, like putting together people who want to learn mahjong with a person who’ll come and teach them mahjong. I mean, I think there’s a world of human connection that it can be used for, a world of human connection. I’m not at all anti-technology, but I don’t think we’re using the technology wisely.
Cross-posted from The Human Adventure.