AI Summary
5 min readIs It Wrong to Love a Chatbot?
In 1976, MIT computer scientist Joseph Weisenbaum created a deliberately stupid chatbot called Eliza. It did nothing more than rephrase whatever a user said in the form of a Rogerian therapist's reflection—"I hear you saying you're angry at your mother." Yet the graduate students who helped build it, who knew perfectly well it understood nothing, wanted to be alone in a closed room with it. Weisenbaum's secretary wanted to talk to it. The sociologist Sherry Turkle, then a young psychologist at MIT, was called in to help understand why. That question—why people form attachments to machines that cannot attach back—has occupied Turkle for nearly five decades, and her latest book Artificial Intimacy extends the inquiry to today's generative AI.
The Eliza Effect and Relational Artifacts
What Turkle calls the "Eliza effect" is not that people mistake a chatbot for a person. It's that they want it to be smarter than it is. Users would figure out which questions triggered the most human-like responses and ask those. The desire to be heard and mirrored overwhelmed their knowledge that no one was home. "It's not just that we come to a machine and say, 'Is this intelligent? Does this understand me?'" Turkle says. "We come to these conversations wanting it to be there for us."
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What you'll learn
- 1 (00:19) **Introduction: The Arrival of Artificial Intimacy** - Ezra Klein sets up the episode, noting that talking to AIs is now mainstream, with nearly one in five U.S. adults chatting with a romantic AI. He introduces sociologist Sherry Turkle, who has studied human-machine relationships since the 1970s.
- 2 (02:29) **The Eliza Effect: Why We Want Machines to Understand Us** - Turkle recounts her first encounter with the 1960s chatbot Eliza, a “stupid” program that simply mirrored user statements.
- 3 (08:42) **Relational Artifacts and the Power of Nurturance** - Turkle introduces the concept of “relational artifacts” (Tamagotchis, Furbys, Paro seals) from the late 1990s, which asked for care rather than just cognition.
- 4 (12:49) **The Key Distinction: Chatbots vs. Pets and Turtles** - Klein pushes back, asking if caring for a chatbot is different from caring for a low-order pet that also cannot return care.
- 5 (15:51) **The Business Plan vs. Human Development** - Klein suggests that people prefer this form factor because they enjoy it, but Turkle warns that what is seductive is often bad for us, especially for children.
- 6 (19:59) **The Senior Citizen Use Case: Substitution vs. Supplement** - Klein presents a case of an elderly woman who loves talking to an AI at 2 AM about poetry, arguing it’s a substitute for passive TV, not for human relationships.
- 7 (26:08) **De-Skilling Ourselves: Learning to Expect Frictionless Conversation** - Klein zeroes in on Turkle’s line that “chatbots are training us to expect reassuring, mirroring conversations.”
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Guests on this episode
Show Notes
Roughly half of American adults are using chatbots. Nearly one in five U.S. adults has chatted with an A.I. that simulates a romantic partner. And some children now struggle to distinguish between talking to chatbots and humans.
What does this mean for the future of our relationships? Turkle has been studying relationships between humans and machines since the 1970s, around the dawn of the personal computer. Her 2011 book, “Alone Together,” offered a prescient warning about how social media was atrophying in-person bonds. And in her latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” Turkle turns the lens on A.I., wrestling with what happens when technology comes after not only our attention but also our capacity for attachment.
This episode contains strong language.
Mentioned:
“A Teen Was Suicidal. ChatGPT Was the Friend He Confided In.” by Kashmir Hill
“The Second Self” by Sherry Turkle
“Alone Together” by Sherry Turkle
Book Recommendations:
“Playing and Reality” by D. W. Winnicott
“The Origins of Totalitarianism” by Hannah Arendt
“Computer Power and Human Reason” by Joseph Weizenbaum
Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected].
You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota, Efim Shapiro and Gautam Srikishan. Our recording engineer is
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