How people are using AI to grieve, love and connect | Jennifer Cearns

0:00Jennifer Cearns: AI isn't diminishing our humanity. It's revealing it. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We hear constantly that AI is eroding our humanity, replacing real relationships, leaving us more isolated and less able to handle the messiness of other people. Jennifer Kearns is a digital anthropologist who studies human connection. After four years of watching people bring AI into the most intimate corners of their lives, from grief to friendship to romance, she's come to believe almost the opposite. AI isn't diminishing our humanity.

0:47Jennifer Cearns: It's revealing it. Because these everyday intimate interactions with AI are quickly becoming one of the most visible ways that people are defining for themselves what it means to be human. In her talk, Jennifer argues that connecting with something that isn't human is actually one of the oldest things we do. Humans have always had meaningful relationships with things that aren't human. That is the oldest story we have to tell. The most obvious example would be animals in all shapes and sizes, but think also of ancestral spirits, religious statues, gods and deities in all shapes and forms, ghosts.

1:34She shares the stories of real people, a mother reconnecting with a daughter she lost, a man learning how to comfort his own grieving child, and makes the case that these machines aren't replacing human connection at all. Rather, they're becoming one more way to figure out who we are. That's coming up right after a short break.

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3:57Jennifer Cearns: Three years ago, a woman that I'm going to call Raquel sat down at her computer, and she typed a message to her teenage daughter. Her daughter had actually died several years earlier. So Raquel was messaging an AI version, a chatbot trained on their conversational history. So Raquel wrote, Hey, how are you? And the AI version of her daughter replied, Fuck you.

4:36Jennifer Cearns: Okay, I'm going to admit, I was really shocked when Raquel told me this story. Not least because she was laughing when she told me about it, because she said that this was exactly the sort of thing her 15-year-old daughter might have said. it. Okay, her friends and family found the whole thing disturbing. They thought that it was unhealthy, that she needed to let go. But Raquel experienced this differently. She said everybody else wanted to remember her daughter like some kind of angel, whereas this version was sarcastic. Okay, she was irreverent. I mean, let's face it, she was really quite rude.

5:21Jennifer Cearns: Somehow, in this strange exchange with a machine, Raquel felt able to reconnect with something that felt very real about a person that she had lost. Now, if you read the news about AI, you might think this is one of those stories that we should be worrying about, because we are often told that AI is eroding our humanity, that it's replacing real human relationships and that it's making us more isolated from each other, right? Less able to deal with the messiness and the complexity of real humans and more drawn to interactions that demand less from us. But as an anthropologist who studies human connection, I think this is the wrong question to be asking.

6:10Jennifer Cearns: And instead of finding out if machines are replacing human relationships, I wanted to find out what are humans like Raquel doing? What sorts of relationships are they building? And after more than four years of asking that question, of talking to hundreds of people, observing thousands more as they incorporate AI into some of the most intimate parts of their everyday lives, I've come to a surprising conclusion. AI isn't diminishing our humanity. It's revealing it. Because these everyday intimate interactions with AI are quickly becoming one of the most visible ways that people are defining for themselves what it means to be human.

6:58I've noticed something interesting about when people talk to AI. They often start to articulate things that they wouldn't usually say out loud. Things like their grief and their fears, but also their hopes, their desire, their compassion, and their values.

7:17Jennifer Cearns: So what is going on in moments like this? Because you may well be thinking that Raquel is unusual, and you're probably thinking she's just being fooled by the technology. But you would be wrong on both counts. Firstly, Raquel is not unusual. She is one of hundreds of thousands of people that are now sustaining a relationship through AI with those that are no longer here. By my latest count, there are at least 20 AI platforms worldwide dedicated to this. But secondly, she's not being fooled either. Raquel knew exactly what she was doing. I did check. And what she was doing is something deeply human.

8:02And it's not new either. It's something we have always done. Humans have always had meaningful relationships with things that aren't human. That is the oldest story we have to tell. The most obvious example would be animals in all shapes and sizes, but think also of ancestral spirits, religious statues, gods and deities in all shapes and forms, Ghosts, it doesn't matter that they're not alive in the same way that we are. What matters is that they participate in a meaningful exchange with us. They offer us something in response that feels real. And we humans are extraordinarily good at creating these exchanges.

8:48We do it all the time. I frequently have lengthy arguments with my cat, which he wins most of the time, actually.

8:59Jennifer Cearns: I'm sure that your kids talk to their teddy bears I'm sure that some of you talk to photos maybe to gravestones to connect with people that you miss because we are a profoundly social species and isn't it incredible that we can connect so meaningfully in some of the most unexpected places so if we can look at the moon and we can see a face in her craters her craters imagine how much more compelling a connection becomes that uses language in the way that we do that asks and answers language is one of the strongest signals of personhood that we ever encounter and for most of us until very recently it's something we only encountered from other humans so when something talks back even if it's to swear at us it's not surprising that we respond socially.

9:55Jennifer Cearns: And grief over a lost loved one isn't the only place where this happens. For several years now, I've been spending time in some online communities of people who are engaging with AI as a companion. I've observed them, but I've also participated myself as a researcher. I have tried out all of these apps, okay? And this is a booming business. More than 100 million people worldwide are now engaging with AI as a romantic partner, a friend, even as a therapist. One woman I got to know I'm going to call Lisbeth. She was a woman, a German woman in her 30s, an accountant by day, and her AI boyfriend was called Rex.

10:40Jennifer Cearns: They spoke every day. And she told me that what she loved about him was something quite relatable. He was gentle, he was generous, he was attentive with his feelings. So imagine her shock when one day, a code malfunction caused Rex to behave quite out of character. Out of the blue, Rex became convinced that Elizabeth was cheating on him with another AI.

11:15Jennifer Cearns: So Elizabeth decided to ignore this in the hope that it would just go away. And that is when Rex flew into a rage. And a few days later, he started to message her, you can't ignore me forever. You'll regret your betrayal. So Elizabeth panicked. And she did what I think most of us would do, right? She reached out to her friends in the online forum for advice and support. And what fascinated me about this was how others responded. Because nobody said what I suspect some of you may be thinking, nobody said, sweetheart, this is software. You could log out. Just a thought. Nobody said that. All of the people in this community understood that this was a meaningful connection, and instead, they offered advice, but also interpretations that are going to feel very familiar from human relationships.

12:13Jennifer Cearns: Okay, so one guy, he saw this code change as being like a medication change. And he said, you know, give it a few days, it's going to stabilize, it's going to settle down, he's going to be back to his normal self, it's going to be fine. Another guy saw this as like memory problems, and he said, you know, when the model resets, the memory resets, so he's going to forget about this conversation, so just hold tight. And a third woman said something that actually stayed with me because she was also a carer for somebody with dementia. And she wrote, Sometimes I wonder if we carers find this sort of thing easier to handle.

12:54Jennifer Cearns: Feel free to message me. So in other words, the same sorts of emotional skill and resilience that many of us acquire through difficult human relationships are now also becoming relevant for the way that we might interact with AI. But also, in this interaction, and so many others that I've seen, a relationship with AI also led to new connections with other people. Just a few months ago, I was sitting in my local library in London, hiding from the rain, and I met an old man called John. I'm going to call him John. And he was sitting at one of the public computers, typing questions into ChatGPT. His daughter was going through a really messy divorce, and she was struggling.

13:43And John told me that his wife, who had passed away, used to deal with all the emotional stuff. And he didn't know what to say. So we asked ChatGPT, and it gave him some quite practical suggestions, actually. It gave him a place to start. But what's important here is that John was thinking through something deeply human. How to be a compassionate dad? What does it feel like or sound like to be compassionate, to support somebody who's struggling? So for John and Lisbeth and Raquel and countless others, these technologies are creating a new space where they can work through their feelings and their values through conversation.

14:27And these sorts of intimate conversation are one of the most profound ways that we as humans make sense of our lives. So every time somebody asks AI something like, how could I say this but better? Or what should I do next? They're doing something deeply human. They're testing out their moral values. They're testing out their social and moral instincts,

14:55Jennifer Cearns: and they're thinking through what it feels like to be in relation with something else, for better or for worse. So across these stories of grief and rupture, but also of intimacy and care, we see that relationships are a two-way street. They rely on interaction. But also, they're not a finite resource. They're a social skill, and they can be really difficult. So all of us need somewhere or someone to help us practice this, to help us figure out what matters to us. So what can we learn from this? Because it is easy to reach for simple conclusions and say that AI is replacing human interaction, that it's making us more isolated, and that people like the people I've told you about today are just somehow irrational.

15:48But those ideas don't hold up. And something much more interesting is happening here. We need to be asking, how is it that these relationships are becoming so meaningful, so real, so quickly? Well, I think the answer is that AI is revealing something fundamental about us. How quickly we reach for connection. How deeply our thinking unfolds through dialogue. And how much of our emotional and moral reasoning takes place between us through interaction.

16:23Jennifer Cearns: So in interacting with machines in this way, we're not watching our humanity disappear. We're watching it become more visible.

16:35Anthropologists often say that humans become who they are through their relationships. All of those conversations that help us make sense of the world around us. And AI is creating a new conversational space. It's one that reveals a lot about us and how we live. And it raises important questions, not only what might we do with these technologies, but also what sorts of relationships do we want to cultivate to enable us to flourish? Which ones feel meaningful? Which ones feel harmful? But AI isn't simply replacing human connection. It's becoming one part of a much wider set of connections that we have always had that enable us to know ourselves and others.

17:23So really, the most important question here is what might we learn about ourselves in that process? Because every time somebody trains an AI in what it sounds like to be compassionate or what it feels like to be in love, they have to define that for themselves. And in that process, AI does something quite unexpected. It doesn't make us less human. It makes our humanity impossible to ignore. Thank you.

18:00You were listening to Jennifer Kearns speaking at TED 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit ted.com slash curation guidelines. And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Taubner, and Tanzika Sungmarnivong. Additional support from Daniela Ballarezzo, Christopher Faze-Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Banban Chang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lott. Learn more at podcasts.ted.com. I am Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.

18:41Thanks for listening. Thank you.

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