Artificial Intimacy

If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence now comes for something deeper: our capacity for attachment.

Today’s chatbots do more than plan our travel and analyze our investments. They offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and therapists — always available, endlessly patient, asking nothing in return. They promise to be intimate machines. Never before has a technology reshaped daily life as rapidly as generative AI. Renowned psychologist Sherry Turkle, who helped define our understanding of human-computer relationships, calls this emerging chatbot culture artificial intimacy, our new AI.

Artificial Intimacy captures the seductive, beguiling nature of our new faux companions, exploring not just what AI does for us but what it does to us. Here Turkle traces its effects throughout a human life — from childhood to parenthood, from work to love and more. She warns that these machines are quietly reshaping humanity – teaching us to avoid risk, sidestep difficult conversations, deny grief, and relinquish skills that make us human: empathy, resilience, the ability to navigate uncertainty. 

For decades, Turkle has explored how digital technologies transform our relationships, our identities, and our understanding of what is most important about being a person. Now, she turns her attention to a technology that has convinced so many that the performance of empathy is empathy enough. Essential reading for parents and children, clinicians and patients, managers and employees, Artificial Intimacy offers both a cautionary tale and a roadmap for being human in the age of AI.