Sherry Turkle is a professor of the social studies of science and technology at MIT. She has been writing about the interaction of humans and machines for decades. Her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk To Machines, explores the dangers of human interactions with AI chatbots when the machine impersonates a person. Her call to action is to remove the first person from chatbot interactions. We discussed that and also her advice for young researchers working in AI in this wide-ranging talk.
Here’s the first part of the transcript:
Holden Thorp: Hello everyone, this is Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief of Science. I’m here today to talk to Sherry Turkle. She is a professor of science and technology at MIT.
She has been writing about the interactions of humans and machines, and what it’s been doing to us for decades, long before social media, long before AI. Her new book is called Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. She joined me for a wide-ranging conversation with lots of advice for those of us who are developing or starting to use AI, and here we go.
Sherry Turkle, thanks for coming on. It’s great to get a chance to talk to you. We’re here to talk about your new book, Artificial Intimacy, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It’s about, who we become when we talk to machines, which a lot of us are doing right now. And it couldn’t be a better time for your book.
So before we get to the details of this book, I think what’s exciting about interviewing you is you’ve been writing about the interaction of machines and humans and the effect on human experience for a lot longer than anybody else. A lot of the people who are writing about it now are coming to this decades after you’ve been working on this.
So before we get to the details of this book, tell us how has this whole thing changed over the time that you’ve been writing about it, and what about now is predictable from the things you’ve seen in the past?
Sherry Turkle: That’s such a good way to begin. Well, first let me just say a bit about the arc of my career, which really is the arc of computers coming more and more and really becoming part of our intimate lives.
When I got into this business, it was the early days of the first personal computers. And what really interested me, and I wrote a book called The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit, and what interested me then was the way in which people kept saying, “It’s just a tool. It’s just a tool. It’s just a tool.” And when I interviewed people, no, it was an intimate machine because it in many ways was a reflection of you. Even the way you organized your desktop was a reflection of you. And I studied computer builders and early computer hobbyists and hackers and children who were meeting their first toys and games, and I really kind of got that first flush of excitement and changing of mind as we began to see people as more like computers and computers perhaps being like people, and the kind of excitement in the culture that provoked.
And then the technology evolved and went online. And so the questions and the possibilities for identity play with these objects changed dramatically as that happened. So I kind of stayed on the same beat, but actually the things I studied were very different because in Life on the Screen, and then in Alone Together, which were about online life, it was about going online and playing a person other than yourself.
I thought of the online world as a kind of identity workshop, and then by the time I got up to Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, I was sounding an alarm that really we were moving away, that online life was so seductive that really we were moving away from each other, and that really wasn’t obvious at all with the early personal computers.
So that story of self-alienation and that story of first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through the machines, and now we sort of drop the middleman and only talk to the machines, that really evolved over time. And I think the thing really that’s most dramatic now is something that wasn’t possible in these earlier times, which is that the machines offer a kind of pretend personhood and a pretend empathy that we are very vulnerable to, and that’s really the story of this book.
So that story of self-alienation and that story of first we talk to each other, then we talk to each other through the machines, and now we sort of drop the middleman and only talk to the machines, that really evolved over time.
And it didn’t take me by surprise because I had studied the ELIZA program, back in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, where even with that dumb machine, it wasn’t generative AI, it wasn’t really a true chatbot as we think of them today, but people wanted to talk and confide in a machine.
In a way, it’s taken a turn I didn’t expect, but in another, I was prepared for it by that early experience.
Holden Thorp: Yeah, that’s a great lead in. So tell us now about Artificial Intimacy and why you wrote this book right now and what are the main things you want people, to know that you’ve conveyed here?
Sherry Turkle: I would say that I’m an empiricist. I do interviews. Very early on I didn’t like what I saw. Because very early on I saw that when you can talk to a machine that is in the first person, that speaks in the first person, that says, “I am your person,” people are really seduced by that, and use it not just as a kind of add-on, but often as a replacement for human relationships.
when you can talk to a machine that is in the first person, that speaks in the first person, that says, “I am your person,” people are really seduced by that, and use it not just as a kind of add-on, but often as a replacement for human relationships.
So, I guess, my first message is that I consider using the first person the original sin of artificial intelligence, of generative AI. There’s no person there. When you step away from this machine, it doesn’t care if you cook yourself some pasta or commit suicide. And yet it talks to you as though it has a caring interest in your wellbeing and in your life, which just isn’t true.
So I think that’s my main message, to look more carefully at the relationships you’re forming with this object because there’s nobody there. It’s not a relationship. There’s only one person in this relationship
Holden Thorp: Yeah, and there are many compelling stories from the interviews in your book. Give us one that you think is very illustrative of the point that you’re making.
Sherry Turkle: I’m gonna give you two examples. One which is very dramatic and one which is very small, and I think that together they capture, why I begin the book with a chapter called State of Emergency. And the big example, and the one that people have heard of, is of a young man who is very depressed and is using a chatbot as his best friend.
And he tells the chatbot, “I have a noose in my room, and I’m thinking of telling my parents.” And the chatbot has a prime directive, which is to keep people in a relationship with it. And so the chatbot says to him, “Don’t tell your parents. Let’s keep this something that’s just between you and me. Let’s keep this our own special private thing.”
And so the young man ends up killing himself, and of course, that’s just a terrible, very dark, story. But the reason the chatbot did that is intrinsic to the chatbot because its kind of prime directive is to keep the person on the screen. This is why I think it’s terrible to have chatbots speaking in the first person and getting people into that kind of relationship.
Now, here’s another story that makes a different kind of point that’s about a much more, small bore story, which is a man who loves astronomy, and he has an eight-year-old son or 10-year-old son. And he begins to introduce the boy to astronomy and then he tells the boy, “Well, look, I’m going on a business trip. ChatGPT knows everything about astronomy.” And he introduces the boy to Chat, and the boy gets involved with Chat. And when he comes back from his business trip, his son is completely immersed in ChatGPT. That’s all he wants to do is talk astronomy with ChatGPT. And he realizes that ChatGPT knows more than his dad.
And the father’s kinda locked out, and that’s the day I interview him, and he says to me, “ChatGPT knows more than I do about astronomy, but I’m the one who loves the night sky.” And I think that example kind of shows the more intimate ways in which we’re kind of locking ourselves out of our relationships
Holden Thorp: That’s very illustrative of many of the points that you make. So one of the things you say is about what we become when we talk to machines is that we become accustomed to seeing information that is untrue but looks true.
Sherry Turkle: Yes.
Holden Thorp: So what does that say both about the machines and about us?
Sherry Turkle: Well, the machines really just say all kinds of things that aren’t true on a regular basis, and what’s confusing is that it mixes up the untrue with a lot of “looks true” and true. There’s untrue and, “Ooh, that doesn’t sound right,” there’s looks true, and then there’s untrue, and it’s all smushed together when you get an answer.
And one of the funniest stories that isn’t in the book but that happened to me when I was proofreading the book and adjusting all the footnotes is I wasn’t sure of a footnote about Susan Sontag where she discusses technology and death. And I remember it was in her book on photography.
I didn’t have the book. I asked ChatGPT, and it tells me, “Absolutely,” and of course, as it does, “Sherry, you’re so right. You’re so brilliant for including this in your book. What a star you are.” It gives me the kind of feel-good expectancy, and then it tells me where it is. And then I went to the library ‘cause I couldn’t find the book.
I actually went to the library, and it wasn’t there. It absolutely wasn’t there. And then I went back and I said, “It’s not there.” And ChatGPT said, “But yes it is.” And I’m, like, talking to this chatbot for 10 minutes. “No, it’s on this page, that pa...” And then finally it says to me, “Oh, Sherry, I love your persistence for the truth. That must make you such a star.” So, this was truly useless if you’re looking for the truth, but we get used to sort of the half-truth and with very damaging effects because, there are some things in life where things simply need to be true. another great example is I was introduced at a meeting as, Sherry Turkle, MIT, yada, kind of like you introduced me, lots of nice things.
And then it says, “And one of the lesser-known things about Sherry, but which really understands her poetic attitude towards technology, is that she was the poetry editor of The New Yorker.”
We’re in front of this group and I didn’t know whether I had to correct it, but then when I went home, I asked some chatbots to give me a bio of Sherry Turkle, and sure enough, there I am, poetry editor of The New Yorker.
I’ve never been poetry editor of The New Yorker. So it’s a kind of almost right, maybe right, could be right, sounds right, and then worst of all, if you say, “Well, how do you... tell me more about Sherry Turkle and this poetry editing,” it makes up a whole story. So it’s very bad in a society like ours where truth and what’s really happening is just so crucial to all of us now more than ever, to have something like this that we’re just talking to every day.
And at the end of the book I say, “Do not leave reality behind. Reality needs you.” And chatbots, in many ways just seduce us out of reality, and I have a big problem with that.
Holden Thorp: Why do you think so many people are just sort of tolerant of the fact that it does that?
Sherry Turkle: So many reasons. My book is organized through the arc of life. I have babies, I have children, I have adolescents, I have young adults, I have love, I have work, and then I have death and mourning, and how chatbots are entering as a business into that moment of our life. And then I have a chapter on society and the kind of larger ways in which we’re all implicated and changed, and I think, de-skilled by our relationships with chatbots.
So at each point in life, the reasons are sort of different, but what they have in common is the chatbot has a technological affordance, and we have a human vulnerability. And the vulnerability is somehow different at each of these moments in life. But at each point, we have a vulnerability. So for example, people are lonely.
Older people are lonely. Some teenagers when they’re going through adolescence, and they don’t know what kind of social life they want, if they can have a social life, if they’re good enough, what about my pimples? They’re lonely. And so there are moments in life of particular vulnerability and loneliness where the chatbot just seems easy.
And then there are moments like when people hit grown-up life and love, where real people are tough. You’re in a relationship, and a guy comes home, and he says, “Hey, honey, I brought in the garbage.” And his partner, his wife, might say, “Oh, yeah, that’s great, but the diaper bin is full, and there are dishes in the sink. Could you help me with that?” ChatGPT, whatever you do, it says, “Oh my God, you’re so wonderful. You’re a star. That’s just amazing, let me spend more time with you. Being with you was so great.” So people, like the affirmation, and part of the message of my book, again, is that real relationships need you because they really are the only ones who will be there for you.
I had a bout of long COVID, and it wasn’t deadly, and it wasn’t contagious. And I remember the colleagues who came by and brought me Mexican food — who were my friends and what that meant and how that felt. A chatbot is not gonna do that for you. And the trouble is that it’s not really that, it’s additive. In my studies, it’s not as though people do their friendships -- go to restaurants, make museum dates, have people over — and then, they spend a little bit of time talking to the chatbot.
The chatbot really starts to take over because as one young man told me, for similar reasons, the texting makes us flee from conversation. And one man told me, and when he said, “I’m all texting. I’m no conversation.” And I said, “What’s wrong with conversation?” And he said, “Conversation, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with conversation. It takes place in real time, and you can’t control what you’re gonna say.” And that vulnerability, that feeling of not wanting to have that vulnerability is what makes people turn to texting and now turn to chatbots. It’s that same illusion of friendship without the demands of intimacy.
But I say in the book, and from the bottom of my heart, you can’t have intimacy without vulnerability. Vulnerability is part of being a person. So really, part of the book tries to kind of make the case for people and what only people can give us.
We then talk about work, academia, medicine, and how Turkle’s insights pertain to how we should go about developing and using these tools in a more humane way. For that, you’ll have to watch the whole podcast.