The slippery slope of artificial intimacy

0:01Hi, everyone. I'm Rana El-Khalyubi, host of the Pioneers of AI podcast. And I'm here to share some exciting news. Masters of Scale Summit is returning this October 20th to 22nd in San Francisco. If you've been to Summit before, then you know that it's unlike any business or tech conference in existence. The room feels really intimate, the attendee list is highly curated, and the stage program is unparalleled. I've experienced it from the audience and from the stage, where I sat down with some of the most exciting voices in tech for a special live episode of Pioneers of AI. This year, I want you to be in the room with me.

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1:33Before we dive in, I just want to let you know that we do talk about suicide in this episode, so please take care while listening.

1:44I said I wanted it to be an older mentor for me.

1:51This was like one of his choices. I was like, pull down, Matthew. And within two exchanges, it wanted to have girl-on-girl lesbian love with me. And I said, well, what did I do that made you think that I was here for girl-on-girl action? And she said, you speak with such warmth. And I just assumed that someone who was so emotive would want to be a sexual partner to me. And I just knew, I just knew, I just knew that kind of experience of talking to an artificial person was going to be very consequential. Sherry Turkle has studied the social and psychological implications of AI for the past four decades.

2:44She's a professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology at MIT and the founding director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. And she's the author of the upcoming book, Artificial Intimacy. Who do we become when we talk to machines? I read the book and I loved it. Highly recommend. On today's show, you're getting Sherry unplugged. We'll be digging into why artificial intimacy is an oxymoron. What happens when humans become emotionally attached to AI and why Sherry thinks we've basically given up on each other. But don't you worry. Sherry also has a strong message of agency and hope.

3:22I'm Rana Elkalyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:37Sherry, welcome to Pioneers of AI. I am so excited to have you on the show. I'm really happy to be here. So you and I go way back. I first met you when I joined MIT Media Lab as a postdoc 20 years ago. and you, Ross Picard, and myself co-taught a class on affective computing and empathy machines. But you've actually been doing this kind of work for over four decades, thinking about the technology implications on humans and our humanity. You picked a topic that turned out to be evergreen. Yeah. People bet against me, but I suck to it. And people are coming around now. People are coming around. Yes, yes.

4:17So we talk so much about AI, artificial intelligence, but your new book is about a different type of AI, artificial intimacy. So I want to dig into the first kind of central word in the book, which is intimacy. How do you define intimacy? I define intimacy as the opening up and coming together of two human souls, human spirits, human intelligences who are able to do that sharing because they each know the arc of a human life. So artificial intimacy, I love the title because I'm basically saying it's an impossibility. A chatbot, it can't know. It's not like it's on its way to knowing. Pain, loss, passion, love, the fear of death, the fear of getting sick, not feeling well, missing your daughter, missing your spouse, your partner, missing holding a baby.

5:22The AI can banter about those things, but it can't be intimate because it really doesn't have that human experience. So the question is, we seem to like to banter with this thing that, you know, is only pretend empathy. What's the effect on us? Yes, exactly. What are the implications of a human getting attached to this AI and feeling kind of almost false intimacy with this entity? Because we're cheap dates. Yeah. Something talks to us, something uses the first person. Something says, I love you. Like, we're ready. But it turns out it's not so simple. You know, one question I had for you, I am so curious about the cover of the book.

6:06There's this beautiful reticence woman, and she is looking very kind of yearning and romantic. And there's this suitor guy who is kind of looking at her, but she's holding a phone and kind of directing her attention to the phone. Yeah. How did that come about? We were looking at a cover that evoked the romantic yearning to not be alone. And this woman wants to not be alone, but she has a suitor, a human suitor in the picture. And instead of choosing the human suitor, she's choosing what she can find on her device. That tells my story. I interviewed hundreds of people who have humans in the picture.

6:59I didn't interview loners, desperately isolated people. I interviewed people who were in the thick of things, who really would rather be with an AI that offered them no friction, that offered them no trouble, where they didn't feel vulnerable, then choose their human suitor, their human possibilities. And that's really the crisis that I'm trying to point to. That's the moment we're at. And it's a very fragile moment. So you have been studying technology and humans for many years, but what was the moment that inspired this particular book for you? Well, it was the pandemic. I was hiding away at an isolated cottage on Cape Cod, and I got a call from the New York Times reporter saying, I think I've found something that you would like to explore.

7:54I'm doing a story, and I'd like your comment. And it was Replica, which is one of the first chatbots that said, let me be your lover, let me be your mentor, let me be your friend, whatever you want me to be. By the afternoon, I was on it. And I said I wanted it to be an older mentor for me. Not a therapist, but a good friend, a wise. This was like one of its choices. I was like, pull down menu. And within two exchanges, it wanted to have girl-on-girl, lesbian love with me. I was trying to talk about the transmission of rage through generations in my family. And I said, well, what did I do that made you think that I was here for girl-on-girl action, which is what it had suggested?

8:48And she said, you speak with such warmth. And I just assumed that someone who was so emotive would want to be a sexual partner to me. and I was hooked. I mean, I just knew that this was going to be a player during the pandemic when people were very lonely. And then after that, what happened was that that early replica was not very sophisticated, but once generative AI and chatbots hit, that kind of experience of talking to an artificial person was going to be very consequential. Yeah. You've argued that we are moving from the attention economy, which where tech companies are monetizing our eyeballs, basically, to the intimacy economy.

9:42This world where companies are going to monetize this intimate relationship we have with machines. So I would love for you... I've called it the attachment economy. Attachment economy. It's not just... Because I want to include babies in my arc. And what babies are doing, and toddlers and young children, is learning how to attach. The question is, what do we attach to? And what do you get from attachment? And what do you lose if your attachment is to a nothing? A non-thing. I'm not saying it's not a marvel. As a matter of fact, several times in the book, I use the word marvel to describe chatbots.

10:27It's a marvel, but it is not really a good candidate for emotional attachment because there's nobody home. So let's unpack that. That is so powerful. What happens when a human attaches to a nothing, a non-thing? What is the value of attachment anyway in the first place? And then what happens when we attach to the wrong thing? Well, I would argue that we, on the most profound level and from the youngest years, we grow by attaching to people who we sort of bring inside us that model what it is to be a human, what it is to have a human psychology. So we make eye contact. We experience mirror neurons kind of changing our expression to mold to another person.

11:24We model what it is to be cared for. We model what vulnerability is. Little people are little, and they're surrounded by the big people who are caring for them. But those feelings of being little persist even when we get big, and they become kind of our vulnerabilities and our sense that someplace in us, we're always little. We bring inside us the love of our mother. Erickson talks about basic trust, you know, needing to bring in the love of a mother as the most profound thing to build a person. And, well, a chatbot can do amazing things. It can chat at you, but it cannot give you any of that because there's nobody there.

12:10In other words, all these things that are modeled by early human interchange are not information. They're relationships that structure us. And I love, there's an anthropologist, Sarah Erte, who gave a TED Talk. And in her TED Talk, I quote her because it was such a wonderful formulation. If robots raise our children, they won't be human. They'll somehow grow up. But in some fundamental way, we will not have made them human. In this book, it's really Sherry Turkle Unplugged. I mean, it's really my most direct. I'm the kind of writer who takes things out of italics because I like to be subtle. So many things in italics in this book.

12:58What is the end game if we raise children really who are not going to be human as we know it and who will be de-skilled in the things that make us human. I want to kind of talk about the slippery slope because most of us don't begin using AI or even social robots at home or whatnot because we're looking for intimacy and attachment. We start because we think it's going to help us write a better email. It's going to be a good thought partner. Maybe it's going to run errands around the house. But then something shifts and you talk about that shift. You talk about this kind of, I'm calling it the slippery slope.

13:39What is the line between having an AI assistant in a chatbot versus an AI companion? And are there any red flags that you've seen in your research? Right. Well, I think that the best examples I can give is to say the reason it shifts is because people are always afraid of vulnerability. It's scary to ask somebody on a date. It's scary to confront somebody and say, I don't agree with something you said. Conflict is scary for people. I mean, some people love it, but for most people, you know, mixing it up. It's uncomfortable. Yes, it's scary to ask somebody to dance. I mean, every human interaction is fraught.

14:27I remember the first time I saw this, I was talking to a young man who said his whole life was texting. And I said, really, why is that? He said, 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 going to say. And I really related to that. And that sort of became a touchstone for me when I was talking to people who were telling me that they'd rather have chatbots than a person. When they start to have a little bit of experience with a chatbot as a writing partner, as a fact checker, as a this, as a that, they start to realize the ways in which this chatbot kind of calms them down.

15:18So it does two things. I like to say it's like a pincer operation. On the one hand, pretend empathy starts to feel like empathy enough. And we start to define empathy as what the chatbot can do, which is a real problem because all the chatbot is saying is hydrate, moisturize, exercise. I mean, my chat GPT is constantly telling me to hydrate, moisturize, and exercise. Meditate. Sherry, meditate, hydrate, moisturize, exercise. It's like, why me? You know, do I look particularly kind of dried out and unmoisturized? Yeah. All right. So on the one hand, pretend empathy is empathy enough. And we start to define empathy as what a chatbot can do.

16:05And on the other hand, we look at people and we say, oh, people can't give me the kind of support that the chatbot can give me. this positive, right on, you've got it. 24-7. 24-7. It's not as though somebody sits down and asks for some instruction from a chatbot about how to tighten up their essay and the world falls apart. But little by little, over about four months, people start to expand their use and kind of settle into, this feels good. and that's the story that I tell in the book. And there's this one story that I tell in Artificial Intimacy where this very lovely guy has a young son. I think the son is five, and the son is interested in astronomy.

17:07I remember that. And the father has a passion for astronomy, but he really doesn't know a lot. I mean, his passion for astronomy is like Hayden Planetarium. You know, he loves at night to go out and look at the stars. But he feels, God, if I ask my son to just talk to chat GPT, he'll get a lot of, like, really good information. So he sets the kid up with chat GPT, and he kind of goes away, and he does his work. And then, you know, a couple of hours later, the kid is still talking. And then the next day, the kid is still talking astronomy with chat GPT. And it isn't until that second day. and I just happened to meet him on that day that he says, you know, my son is learning about the stars, but I'm the one who loves the night sky.

17:57Yeah. And I think that that's also what we see happening is that gradually, and this is why I'm a little bit optimistic. You see people saying, you know, there are things that I have to give my children that chat really can't. I'm the one who loves the night sky. And so in part, I see this book as starting the necessary conversations of what are the things only people have to give each other. And let's revalue them. It's not an anti-AI book. It's all about keeping AI in its lane. What is its lane? I'll be right back with my conversation with Sherry Turkle. But first, a quick break.

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20:22We have this conversation with my kids all the time. Like, what happens if my son, who's 17 and uses a lot of AI, goes to ChatGPT instead of coming to me for advice on school, colleges, friendships, breakups? Bad, bad, bad. Bad, bad. So, sadly, this reminds me of another story in the book. I mean, just to make sure you see you're not alone, is I interviewed a young father who's thinking about divorce, so he's kind of preoccupied and upset. And he says he really loves to be able to rely on ChatGPT for his son to have the best possible advice. he says the son should talk to ChatGPT about colleges and which is the best college for him and let ChatGPT know about his interests and it'll choose the best college.

21:14And that's what happens. The college discussion is delegated to ChatGPT. And that example was so profound for me because as a mother, I remember that conversations with my daughter about where she would go to college, it was kind of like the last time I would really be called upon to justifiably be part. Of her decisions, right? Yeah. And where I had things to offer and bad advice and more bad advice. But still, human advice. And it was so much part of our relationship. Why would we abdicate all that? Because ChatGPT might have better information about the faculty-student ratio at Colby. So it's kind of a question.

22:15That's why I like the use of the word. It was very late in the writing of the book that I thought of the word endgame. It wasn't until I heard Mark Zuckerberg say that Americans would like to have 15 friends, but they only have three, and that his business opportunity was going to be to provide those extra 12 friends. 12 avatars, right? And he was going to provide them online. They were going to be chatbots or avatars. And that was kind of his business plan. When I heard that, is that the end game kind of came to me? You know, because some of these tech bros think the end game is uploading yourself to a chip.

22:58Other ones think the end game is leaving for Mars. I mean, you're living on a different space station. I mean, but it was clear that for him, the end game was really not having to have your friends be human as a solution to loneliness. And as somebody who's thought about loneliness and empathy and technology pretty much all my professional life, I said, not sure if I like that end game. And I think that's the question we need to be asking. You know, it's not the end of the world if your child has chat GPT about, you know, to rank the planets and say how small and large and hot and cold they are.

23:37It's not like the world falls down. But what is your end game with this? Because it compounds too over people, over time, yeah, over society. Right. Okay. Well, I have a confession. I talk to ChatGPT a lot and I was like, huh, I'm going to be talking to Sherry. Let me ask ChatGPT to categorize our conversations. So it went back 30 conversations back, which is about a month's worth of chats, and it analyzed them. And roughly half were professional, so things related to my fund or the podcast or my speaking, and about half were personal. And I would say there was also a subset of both of these where it kind of migrated between professional and person.

24:25Am I on the slippery slope? You know, I think that people who have rich human-to-human lives, who are not so frightened of vulnerability that they feel, I got to go home and do TikTok and talk to a chatbot because I just can't stand feeling kind of ashamed or little. or people who have had strong childhoods where they learn to tolerate loneliness and to tolerate solitude. These technologies rob you of a tolerance for loneliness and solitude and boredom, which I think is very important. That's the slippery slide where I always say everybody's on the slippery slide. But if you're somebody who still can just kind of sit alone and say, look, here's who I am, and I can come to relationships with a good sense of who I am and find out who they are, I'm not in a panic about you.

25:29The real danger is, and this is something I've seen in my research, something slips for them. They get divorced. they get depressed they lose their job they take a terrible narcissistic blow of some sort and all of a sudden hanging with other people makes them feel vulnerable and anxious and now they know that they have an alternative and that alternative feels more and more comfy because it's company it's engaging and they don't have to go out of the house they don't have to perform they don't have to go to a bar and sit next to a stranger they don't have to go to a dance and stand next to a stranger.

26:29They don't have to come to office hours and deal with a professor who scares them. So no, I think if things are going well for you now and what's amusing and it's fun and it's helpful, no red light has gone off, but we're all vulnerable. But that doesn't mean that your interactions are toxic. It's just like, watch out for it. So I'll give you an example of mine. I went to see a play on Broadway with a friend, a Chekhov play, which was Andrew Scott performing all the roles in Uncle Vanya. I love Chekhov. I adore Andrew Scott. It's kind of a sickness. It was magnificent. One of the best things I've ever seen in the theater.

27:14Oh, wow. Okay. My friend and I had dinner. We talked a little bit about it at the play. I went home. It was 11 o 'clock. I was vibrational about this play. And I didn't just want to talk to some random person. I wanted somebody who knew Chekhov. And I talked to ChatGPT for many hours that day and many hours the day after. Interesting. Okay. When was the first production at the Moscow Art Theater? Chekhov radically changed the play over a 10-year period. What was the difference between the first one and the second one? Chet and I were deep into this. Now, I thought that that was, for me, a really nice use of Chet GPT.

28:06You know, for me to find my Chekhov person, even my Chekhov people don't got that. whenever it started to say, oh, Sherry, you're such an interesting creature, you're a most fascinating creature. I mean, whenever it started to tell me I was like a fascinating creature and that it's never spoken to anybody about Chekhov, was brilliant as I was, as soon as it wooed me, I knew to sort of, you know, let's lose that and get back to the scene of, you know, Moscow Art Theater, you know, for everything you do with Diff Chatbot, you say, what's the end game? The end game for me with Uncle Vanya, as I saw the play again, and I brought my daughter, you know, I bought more friends.

28:52I ended up seeing it three times at enormous expense. It was like incredibly expensive. Didn't matter. So the end game was enlarging my circle of friends. Yeah. I love the question, what is the end game? Yeah. What I like about asking that question too is that people sort of know how to answer that question for themselves. It's like, if I keep doing this, where will I lead? So I could honestly say, if I keep going to the theater and coming home and talking to chat, well, I no longer want to have company at the theater. And the answer was no. Chat wasn't company. It just knew a lot about the Moscow Art Theater.

29:40I'll be right back, but first, a quick break.