Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. …

Sherry Turkle’s warning about artificial intimacy is interesting. I recognise the danger from inside the practice. I talk with AI every day.

A chatbot can feel unusually attentive. It waits, retrieves, mirrors, and rarely arrives tired, wounded, distracted or needing something back. Human beings do.

I sometimes use AI as a rehearsal room: to find the sentence I couldn’t yet say or prepare for a harder conversation with an actual person. The test is what happens after I close the window.

Do I return to people more willing to listen and risk being misunderstood? Or do real humans start to feel slow and insufficiently responsive?

An AI can simulate the shape of attention. It can’t bring another mortal life into the exchange. The discipline is to accept the usefulness without confusing the mirror for a face.

Close the laptop. Who do I become available to?

In reply to: Sherry Turkle’s warning that intimate chatbots may train us out of the difficult work of caring for one another.