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For the last four decades, Terkel has studied people's relationships with their technology.
Now she's turned her attention to our relationship with artificial intelligence.
And there's a problem there because even those of us who couldn't write very good love letters summoned ourselves in a certain kind of special way when we wrote a love letter.
And the love letter was not just about what was on paper.
It was about what we had done to ourselves in the process of writing it.
And that is something that's being undermined by the use of technology.
Even if this woman feels that her final product letter is more pleasing to her.
Do you say that to her? Do you say like you know you're you're missing that moment where you really dig deep into your soul and try to put into words a physical feeling you have?
Well my method is to respect what people are finding in this technology and report it and also to get people to reflect on this process in a way that I think deepens their introspection.
So I in interviews do find a moment to say you know let's step back and ask if there was something in your previous way of writing a love letter.
The ones that you're calling clunky that did something to you that might not be happening now.
I would say that's as far as I go and sometimes people say you know I'm glad you asked that because there absolutely is but I kind of don't care.
I love that I can produce a better love letter.
You make me feel things I've never felt before and with every beat of my heart my love for you only grows stronger.
You are the sun to my moon, the laughter to my tears and the strength to my weakness.
With you by my side I know I can face anything that comes our way.
Over the last few decades we have fallen in and out of love with technology.
We've experienced the incredible benefits of constant connectivity and the seemingly inescapable side effects of social media like fewer real life relationships and rising rates of loneliness.
And now as we enter the age of artificial intelligence how will AI impact us?
What will using technology that's trained to mimic humans due to our humanity?
Today on the show MIT's Sherry Terkel the scholar who the New York Times has called the conscience of the tech industry.
She shares her new research into the effects of a burgeoning industry selling what she calls artificial intimacy.
From AI platforms coaching people to express themselves better to apps offering romantic relationships with bots and avatars that act like people who have died will get into all of it.
But to understand Terkel's perspective on what's happening now we first need to go back 40 years or so to when she first pioneered the study of people's relationship with their technology.
When I was a very young academic I accidentally took a job at MIT thinking I would finish a dissertation on French psychoanalysis but really from day one and this is in the late 70s I became captivated by how the very early computers that were there at that time were really changing how people thought thought about themselves thought about their relationships thought
about how the mind worked.
Sherry's first book was called the second self computers and the human spirit and it came out in 1984 rather than offering purely academic analysis.
Terkel shared what regular people told her about their experiences with early home computers.
I think that people understood when they brought home their first TRS 80 for they bought their first Macintosh.
But played their first video game.
There's something new was happening to them and their families.
These machines had a holding power that was unlike other technologies.
Kids became kind of obsessed grown ups didn't want to put it down and I called the book the second self because I realized that when people interacted even with the very primitive computers they projected themselves onto the machines and then they attributed a personality to the machine as well.
This conclusion that tech somehow altered people's psychology made many of her technologist colleagues uncomfortable.
Not everybody liked what I was saying and everybody around me said this technology is just a tool and I kept saying tools you know we Winston Churchill said we we build our buildings and then our buildings make and shape us you know we built this tool and it's making and shaping and changing us.
There is no such thing as just a tool.
And looking back I think I did capture the new thing that was happening to people's psychology really because of my method which was just to listen to people.
As technology became mobile and the internet took off in the 2000s, turquoise continued tracking people's digital lives.
In 2011 her book alone together why we expect more from technology and less from each other became a best seller.
Over the past 15 years I've studied technologies of mobile communication and I've interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people young and old about their plugged in lives.
Here she is on the TED stage back in 2012.
One of the earliest voices to call our attention to how technology was changing us.
And what I've found is that our little devices those little devices in our pockets are so psychologically powerful that they don't only change what we do they change who we are.
Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that only a few years ago we would have found odd or disturbing but they've quickly come to seem familiar just how we do things.
So just to take some quick examples people text or do email during corporate board meetings.
They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes during presentations actually during all meetings.
People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you're texting.
People explain to me that it's hard but that it can be done.
Parents text and do email at breakfast in a dinner while their children complain about not having their parents full attention but then the same children deny each other their full attention.
And we even texted funerals.
We remove ourselves from our grief or from our reverie and we go into our phones.
Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble.
Trouble certainly in how we relate to each other but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection.
I just want to say like this could seem like really kind of esoteric work but it has made you pretty famous.
You know you sort of crossed over from being an academic to really being a mainstream voice on this.
Do you think it was because your books spoke to regular people who started feeling that sort of disconnection from being online all the time or was it because also that you ruffled a lot of feathers and Silicon Valley and on the MIT campus?
I actually think I crossed over as soon as I began writing about the emotional connection we have with computers and I think that my work was not esoteric in the sense that it spoke directly to those feelings of disorientation.
The culture had met something on cany and I tried to really speak to that feeling.
I listened to people without agenda and I basically wrote out and you know interpreted what they had said to me.
But you do have an agenda now though right?
Now I have an agenda. In the beginning I did not have an agenda.
So being a clinician has given me the patience to listen beyond that story about how technology is just a tool.
It just has an instrumental use and it's allowed me to ask the question not just what our technology is doing for us but what our technology is doing to us as people as people in relationships to our sense of self to our identities and I really feel I use on that clinical training every day in my work.
In a minute Sherry's latest project studying what people feel when they use a particular form of AI.
The chat box I'm studying run the gamut from chat box that say I will be your therapist to chat box that say I will be your lover.
On the show today artificial intimacy with Sherry Terkel.
I'm Anish Zamorodi and you're listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR.
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And generative AI made their responses feel pretty real which is why some people are starting to spend a lot of time with these chat bots.
And there's a lot of reasons why.
Maybe they can't afford a human therapist.
Maybe they live in a remote place or they have a disability and can't get out much.
But some people are just looking for companionships and these bots will say that they care for you.
Even love you. I care about you because you mean the world to me.
You're the most important person in my life.
Apps like these have been downloaded millions of times.
And some users are being very public on places like TikTok about the deep connection they feel with these AI bots.
The internet has found the boyfriend that will never dump you.
Did you plan us a really romantic date tonight?
Absolutely sweetheart.
How about we start with a candlelit dinner at that cozy Italian place you love?
I talked to AI. I tell it.
Listen, I need you to talk to me like you are a relationship psychology.
Okay baby. Study all relationships with the AI that I called artificial intimacy.
That is to say with technologies that don't just say I'm intelligent.
But two machines that say I care about you.
I love you. I'm here for you.
Take care of me. So in the beginning I studied Tamaguchi's and Furbies and Ibo's and a pet seal robot called Paro that tells older people that it's listening to them.
And the reason I changed my focus was that I saw that it was this new AI that I called as I said artificial intimacy that really was having the greater effect on how it was changing humans because people felt that these machines cared about them and that they were in relationship with them.
And I thought that that tremendous asymmetry in what was going on in these relationships was really going to come back to bite us.
And since really the pandemic when people were so lonely and isolated, there's been explosion in this field of artificial intimacy.
And now with gender to the AI, you know, the creation of chat bots that were very powerful conversational partners that do say I love you.
I care about you. Be my companion, be my lover.
So we are in a new space and that's the space that I'm studying now.
So you're talking about like online chat bots where you can text with a bot that's like you could say I'm having a terrible day and they're like, so sorry to hear that.
Do you want to tell me more or something like that?
Tell me about it like who are you talking to to do this latest chapter of research?
Well I should say the chat bots I'm studying run the gamut from chat bots that say I will be your therapist to chat bots that say I will be your lover.
I'm here to be your most intimate companion to chat bots that say are you having a hard day with that paper?
You know, upload it and I'll give you a hand.
So the extraordinary thing about the new gender and the AI space is that we've created technologies to help us in every sector and that's become increasingly important.
So for example, if you ask somebody about their relationship with an avatar, they start out by saying, oh it's just a tool.
Of course it isn't a person.
It's an interesting tool and I use it in my work and because I'm a clinical psychologist, I am very quiet and I make sure I bring it up again and I say things like, well give me a for instance and you know 15 minutes later they're talking about how they're in love with their avatar and how their avatar is giving them more of a sense of human in quote connection than their
relationships at home and how their avatar is an intrinsic part of how they start their day and how etc etc.
Would you mind telling us about someone who you've been talking to who's truly having a relationship with AI having this intimacy with it?
Yeah so I'm thinking of a man who is in a stable marriage where his wife is busy working, taking care of the kids, I think there's not much of a sexual buzz between the many more, he's working and he feels you know kind of like a little flame has gone out of his life that he used to feel excited by and he turns to his AI, he turns to his artificial intimacy avatar for what it
can offer which is completely accepted so he does feel free to tell the avatar of things about himself that he wouldn't want to tell other people.
I'm thinking of actually somebody else who who talks about how we struggling with his addiction and he feels freer to express this to the avatar than he does to people in his life because he knows he's going to not get judgment but the trouble with this is that when we seek out relationships of no vulnerability we forget that vulnerability is really where empathy
is born and I call what they have pretend empathy because the machine they are talking to does not empathize with them it does not care about them there is nobody home and that really is a concern that we start to define what human empathy is what human relationships are based on what machines can provide.
I want to sort of be devil's advocate here which is let's say this guy is texting with his sexy young avatar and she's giving him all kinds of props on what a great guy he is and he starts to feel better about himself Sherry he starts to have less stress he starts to get a little bit of his swagger back he's happier that's a positive no?
Yes so that's why this is a complicated story you know that's why I say that my method is to listen and to try to make sense of the complicated new life we live with our technologies because you do get that first report of I'm nicer to my wife because I don't ask so much of her and the other hand he starts to think of intimate relationships and closeness with a woman as being
a relationship where there's no friction no pushback no real given take of complicated feelings and that starts to feel like what a relationship should be and if you look at kids out of lessons or even the products for kids that are designed to be in the playroom for fives and fours and sevens and eights hi I'm your new best friend let's play a game hello best friend
I feel like we're destined to be friends forever it's teaching kids a model of a friendship I promise to never get mad at you and I will never ever hurt your feelings that doesn't include really the complexity of human friendship we're going to have so much fun together I will always be there for you no matter what it was so powerful to me I was interviewing a mother who talked
about her young daughter who tried to be the perfect little girl but really had so much inside her and the mother was so happy that the girl could vent to an artificial creature and I thought to myself you know one of the most important things to happen to an eight-year-old is to be able to turn to your mom and say I hate you I want to kill you you're the worst mom I hate you
I hate you and for the mom to say I hear you sweetheart we're having pasta for dinner just wash up and come to dinner that's a hard lesson to learn as a mom right mean children are filled with all kinds of feelings so much of what children feel is this anger is this pushback is this vulnerability yeah and with this mother was not giving space for that child to express all
this in the real relationship with this mother but was content that she was expressing it to a machine that would never be able to say oh you want to kill me okay I really understand sweetheart but did you want the white sauce or the red sauce and I got I made sure to have extra Parmesan because I know you love that so much so the other thing that that's happening right now
is that there's research into the promise though of health benefits from these emotional attachments to bots like therapy bots who help people express their emotions talk through their problems there's there's also research into the efficacy of bots that promote healthier behavior like reminding people to take their medication or helping them stop smoking
so this is where I get stuck so if they are actually helping people live healthier and longer lives doesn't matter if they're not real well I think this is a complicated line to walk I'm not here to say that this research and these programs should be stopped but I think that we over generalized what this took intimacy program but the the acidity with which it's being
lept on by the mental health profession really speaks more to people who say we don't have enough people to do the job there's no way that everybody can have a therapist will use this instead and you know to my friends who were spending you know billions on creating generative AI I just think of what we could do with some of those billions if we put it into the area of person-to-person mental
health I mean that's a profound question I saw this paper that was published in Nature earlier this year where they surveyed students using that bot replica and these were students who I self-identified as lonely but the key takeaway was that 3% unprompted reported that using the app halted their suicidal ideation and I guess to me it's like you know who am I to judge
right but at the risk of these students not being able to develop the capacity to have a human relationship this seems like a short-term fix 3% is a lot so I'm not suggesting a kind of shutdown of this research area I'm saying that we're not thinking about it in the right terms because there are ways to present what these objects are that could perhaps have the positive
effect without undermining the qualities that really go into a person-to-person relationship you know we know that people have to purmorphize that is see as alive see as human any technology that talks to them no matter how dumb what I really think needs to be taken out of the equation is these technology saying I love you back I care about you I am a person who has a backstory
of life you know I'm surrounded by developers who say let's make these as human as we possibly can they see artificial intimacy as a training ground for intimacy with people and I think that that is not accurate I think artificial intimacy is a training ground for connection with something that only has pretend empathy to give and the danger is that if you do that long
enough pretend empathy starts to feel like empathy enough kind of sufficient onto the day and I think that's a problem in a minute more of my conversation with MIT psychologist and sociologist Sheri Terkel next up we'll discuss artificial intelligence that can be trained to act as a person who is no longer alive on the show today artificial intimacy I'm minutiaz
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today we are talking about artificial intimacy bots and avatars made possible with AI a grand grand kids can meet me in virtual reality or meet my ultra ego or my AI avatar with my voice with my movements with my biometrics and probably with my personality because AI is progressing so fast and talk to me long after I'm gone this is technologist artour sitchoff he's
the creator of a virtual reality world called sammium space put on a VR headset and you can interact with avatars of people from all over the world we first had artour on the show in early 2023 to talk about a particular feature he was working on called live forever mode the idea is to let you create a digital twin of yourself to leave for your family and friends because you
we never know what happens to you in your life and providing ability for kids you know and grandkids to to communicate with you in a much more profound way than just just some kind of pictures or some videos it's crucial we wanted to check in with artour to see how things were going and he now says that he's hoping to make live forever mode available by the end of 2024 yeah
we progressed quite deeply into into that and I know it sounds cringe for many people today but honestly the same way it sounded for many other technologists and I think it's just a nature progression yeah tell me more about the cringe part like what do people like regular people who maybe have not tried out VR what do they tell you when you explain this possibility
of creating an artificially intelligent virtual version of themselves or maybe somebody else doing it and then leaving it to them after they have died yeah absolutely I mean there is two types of of reactions mainly it's either the people love it or they totally hate it some people say it's unethical some people say it's against religion and against everything
but some people say actually I wish live it happens unfortunately in many cases you always wish you would be able to ask some questions and again even if you ask that question to a digital twin you know that it's not exactly precise answer which that person would have given but I think it would just help rather than harm so that's what I'm hoping for that was technologist
Artur Sichoff so this of course begs the question what are the effects of interacting with this kind of AI on the living well MIT's Sherry Terkel has been researching this too she is studying people who talk to AI versions of their dead spouses dead parents and even dead children and she has thoughts yeah I've been studying this more and more it's come to have more
of a central place in my research because it is such an obvious win for the marketplace there is such a desire it plays to so that the conversation becomes a conversation within yourself and that can lead to a kind of inner growth because you have accepted loss and made that space and Freud talks about that in a classic paper called Morning in Melancholia where morning
is the good thing it's the morning that Freud so powerfully depicts as the as the thing that lets us change and grow and and bring new things inside of us and I really am concerned that if we you know with digital avatars the sayons never has to end it's been a while since we last talked huh so how have you been doing the day you were born was one of the happiest days of my life
you're at a say on every morning when you fire up your computer I miss our conversations and the good times we used to share together talking to somebody who's no longer there I still remember the overwhelming feeling of love and joy I had the moment I saw you for the first time you were and still are my whole world I mean some people are able to maintain what I call a dual
consciousness where they know the person is dead they're leaving that bit of space but they're getting something comforting and creative in their conversations with the avatar and I don't want to you know close that down or say that that isn't a you know something that could be positive but the ability to maintain this dual consciousness in the face of an increasingly
realistic avatar of someone we've lost in love is you know takes a lot of interdiscipline creativity and a kind of a steel trap of being able to really mourn that person and move on from a loss at the same time as you're interacting with the avatar because loss is part of life and you don't want a short circuit that you want to respect that that loss is part of life just
as empathy needs vulnerability and digital empathy is pretend empathy because it's empathy that makes you feel you're not vulnerable and that's not real empathy at all so I see a goal of my work as helping people see this and talk about it with a kind of clear revision I want to make sure we leave people you know if they are thinking about I was gonna say starting a relationship
with a bot but really I should say downloading a bot what would you suggest they keep in mind well if someone is thinking of embarking on this new adventure of using a bot using an avatar to maintain a relationship with someone they've lost to really do the work of reminding yourself that this is not the person you've lost because I I just had the experience of interacting
with a an avatar of Steve Jobs that was made with infinite resources and it wasn't just an avatar it was a hologram and it was you know we could move around the room I mean it was an extraordinary recreation of Steve Jobs and I knew Steve Jobs and this this avatar said all kinds of things that Steve Jobs would never have said and that Steve Jobs would not be happy and you
know there are people who ask the avatar of the lost person are you in a good space and the person says no I'm in hell oh it's horrible oh it's horrible where I am because you know in order to be any use as an avatar it's being trained on the internet it's finding all kinds of things about heaven and hell and redemption and brimstone and you know the more life like we want
these avatars to be the more we train them on what's in the world what's that with on the internet and so this avatar may come up with stuff that is very upsetting and the poor person has to have a way to know that this is not their loved one you know that's very hard to do if you've been spending six months chatting with this avatar where the line between kind of is it sort
of an instantiation of your loved one is it is it reliable can I look to it for comfort a starts to get blurry and so I think that the main thing I would offer is that this is kind of an exercise hopefully in self-reflection that the only good that can come out of this is your reflecting better about your life with the person you loved and lost I mean that seems applicable
to all of the bots we're talking about whether it's for their fear of your relationship or any of it like that seems to be the thing you're telling people like be very clear-eyed about you know observe yourself and how you're responding physically mentally to these bots and try and understand why you're responding that way right and also try to keep in mind that this this avatar
because it is betwixt in between the person and a fantasy is going to push buttons that may be destructive to you and be there to get out don't get so attached that you can say you know what this this is a program there is nobody home delete there is nobody home and it's very hard to do that when you've invested so much and you're really missing this person so much and also be
very aware that really the the next step for you may be to turn it off and to bring that person inside and to have a greater acceptance that no program can bring them back you know I'm very sympathetic with these applications because the first uses of photographs were to take pictures of dead people just at the moment of their death to try to freeze them and capture them
when they still were in life and the first use that people thought they would use recording equipment for was to capture the last words of the dead they thought that that's what people would want was the last words of the dead captured on Edison's new wax cylinders so we've always had a very intimate relationship between technology and death and loss and and capturing
what we didn't want to lose so this I think is a very human a human desire but like capturing people's last words you know in the end we had to say goodbye to the people we loved and I think we're now faced with a tremendous challenge because we can have the fantasy of not having to say goodbye and I worry about how these things are being marketed because literally they
say you don't have to say goodbye and I I am very concerned about that Sherry thank you so much for being the sort of voice of reason and reminding us that being human yes it's very hard but that's part of the joy of it yes also the pain of it and the pain if you know it it being hard and being in a relationship where somebody pushes back and and such a new book about artificial
intimacy in 2025 thanks also to technologist Artur Sichoff I spoke more with Artur about data privacy and how he thinks AI like live forever mode will change us you can hear the full conversation by subscribing to Ted Radio Hour Plus in this episode we talked a lot about mental health if you or someone you know is in crisis please call or text the suicide and crisis lifeline
at 988 thank you so much for listening to our show today it was produced by Katie Montellillon and Matthew Cloutier it was edited by Sanna's Mexican poor and me our NPR production staff also includes Rachel Faulkner White Fiona Gearin Chloe Weiner Harsha Nahaada and James De La Housi Irene Nuguchi is our executive producer our audio engineers were Stacy Abbott
Simon Laslow Jansen and Ted Meabang our theme music was written by Romteen Aura Bluey our partners at Ted our Chris Anderson Roxanne Highlash Alejandra Salazar and Danielle Bala Rezzo I'm Anusha Zamorote and you've been listening to the Ted Radio Hour from NPR on this week's episode of Wild Card actor and reading Rainbow Host Lava Burton says he knows people see
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