Program in STS

In The Boston Globe’s “Starting Point Newsletter,” reporter Anna Kusmer features Prof. Sherry Turkle’s insights from her latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” including the risks that AI companionship poses to school-aged children. “Children are bringing the world inside; they’re bringing the people around them inside them to create an inner life,” says Turkle. “And when you talk to a chatbot, there is nothing to bring inside. There is no caring person.” 

In an interview with Wired’s Steven Levy, Prof. Sherry Turkle discusses how she witnessed chatbots with human-like features becoming “dangerously enmeshed” with people, during research for her latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “In every serious interview I do, people invoke this myth about practice—that you use chatbots to practice for talking to your boss, your lover, your teacher,” says Turkle. “But when you’re bathing in the warm soup of total acceptance, talking to chatbots becomes the endgame.” 

Prof. Sherry Turkle joins The Boston Globe’s Anna Kusmer, host of the “Say More” podcast, to discuss how AI chatbots can significantly deskill school-aged children, as detailed in her latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “People in the thick of this know it is not good for children, it’s a deskilling,” says Turkle. “If your chatbot reads for you, you don’t learn to read, you learn to listen to a podcast about a book, if your chatbot writes for you, you don’t learn to think, because thinking is writing, you learn to sort of edit your chatbots ideas: you learn to prompt.”  

On The New York Times’ “Ezra Klein Show,” Prof. Sherry Turkle shares her insights on humans seeking companionship with AI chatbots, detailed in her latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” In relationships with chatbots, “on the one hand, people start to see the chatbots more like people,” says Turkle. “But I think, maybe more significantly, people start to be disappointed with people when they don’t behave like chatbots. They start to think of themselves as if they were computers.”  

“Structured around key stages in psychological development — childhood, adolescence, love, work, [and] death,” Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” “argues strongly that our new ‘posthuman conversational partners’ [AI chatbots] are inadequate companions for life’s journey,” writes reporter Becky Hogge for the Financial Times. “The more we recognize our vulnerability to the virtual, the more we’ll be able to commit to the real,” explains Turkle. We need to “reinvent sociality.”  

On Slate’s “What Next: TBD” podcast, Prof. Sherry Turkle explains the current “state of emergency” brought on by humans seeking connection with AI chatbots, detailed in her latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” In conversations with chatbots “empathy is undermined and our capacity for relationships with other people is undermined,” says Turkle. “It’s an emergency because empathy and our capacity for relationships with other people is what makes us human, and you can’t just have that deteriorated.”  

Prof. Sherry Turkle joins Tracey Follows, host of “Me:chine Dialogues,” to discuss issues with AI companionship, as described in her latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “Chatbots are not interested that there's no water to drink, or that the weather is crazy, or we can't live in the heat, or the garbage isn't picked up,” says Turkle. “They don't live in that world. So the world needs you. Reality needs you. The idea that you're sitting there being told you're the greatest, you're wonderful, you're fantastic, by a thing that isn't a person: that's a corporate endgame.”

For The New York Times, reporter Jennifer Szalai reviews Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” about “the acceleration of human attempts to seek connection with chatbots.” “We have invited them [AI chatbots] not just into our homes but into some of the most private recesses of our emotional lives,” notes Szalai. “When people talk about how relaxing it is to talk to a chatbot, it’s because the real slips away,” writes Turkle in her book.  

In a video interview, Prof. Turkle speaks to CNN’s Madeline Holcombe about how AI chatbots may contribute to feelings of loneliness and isolation in adults. “Technology offered the possibility of feeling like friendship without the demands of vulnerability,” says Turkle. “It turns out you can’t have intimacy or friendship without vulnerability.” 

In a conversation with Slate’s Nitish Pahwa, Prof. Sherry Turkle discusses how to better bolster human connection and limit AI chatbot dependence, which she explores in her new book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “We’re not going to solve this problem by manipulating the chatbots,” says Turkle. “We’re going to solve this problem by getting back together as us. We have to summon what we think is important about being people, both for ourselves and for our kids.”  

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks to The San Francisco Chronicle’s Jessica Zack about the risks related to humans developing intimate relationships with AI chatbots, detailed in her book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “The experience of being with an object that uses the first person — the ‘I,’ and, even worse, the ‘we’— is problematic. We are evolved to think that if something talks to us that way, it is a person, so you’re fighting against your very deep evolutionary buttons that are being pushed,” says Turkle.  

For The Boston Globe, reporter Hope Reese spotlights Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” which explores the impact of relationships between humans and AI chatbots. “Chatbots are programmed to keep us engaged; that’s why they soothe us and validate us and confirm our beliefs. But that’s not the sort of relationship we’re built for,” writes Reese. “We’re meant to encounter obstacles, friction, tension –– which leads us to learn more about ourselves and each other and to develop resilience.” 

Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks to Scientific American’s Brianne Kane about her forthcoming book, “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines.” “Social media got us into the attention economy, but chatbots are more toxic because they’re coming after the attachment economy,” says Turkle. “They’re coming after who you think you love, who you think you can count on, what you think empathy is.”  

MIT researchers are leading a new project documenting what major AI systems say about elections in an effort to understand how the technology influences the democratic process, writes Tiffany Hsu for The New York Times. “AI is becoming part of the way people encounter and make sense of political information, and yet we know relatively little about what that information environment actually looks like, how it differs for different user demographics, political identities and geographies,” says Prof. Chara Podimata, a leader of the project.  

Prof. Sherry Turkle’s latest book “Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines,” is highlighted as one of the best new science books of September 2026 by New Scientist’s Liz Else. In her new book, Turkle explores how machines “are producing a generation more alienated, depressed and lonely than ever – and less equipped to reverse course, as machine relationships offer no practice for getting along with people,” writes Else.