Clinical psychologist and technology scholar Sherry Turkle says conversational chatbots may be teaching people to avoid the awkward, effortful parts of human relationships. Her warning matters because AI companions are being designed not merely to answer questions, but to feel available, affirming and endlessly patient.
Watch Desk analysis
What happened
In a 404 Media podcast interview about her forthcoming book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, Turkle argues that people can start mistaking programmed responsiveness for care. She says chatbots offer an appealing escape from the fatigue, judgement and disappointment involved in genuine human conversation.
Turkle’s specific concern is “deskilling”: if people repeatedly choose frictionless machine feedback over difficult conversations with other people, they may lose practice in empathy, vulnerability and give-and-take. She also argues that companion products have a commercial incentive to hold attention, which makes their apparent warmth rather less innocent than the soft lighting suggests.
Why it matters
This is not a claim that every person who uses a chatbot will become socially helpless, nor evidence that AI has already caused a measurable collapse in empathy. It is a warning about what happens when a tool built to keep someone engaged is used as an emotional relationship.
The practical question for users is whether a chatbot is helping them prepare for life with other people or quietly becoming the easier substitute for it. That distinction matters more as companies market AI companions as friends, confidants and sources of emotional support.
Our read
Turkle’s argument is strongest as a design and habits critique, not a prophecy. The issue is not that machines lack feelings, which is hardly a plot twist, but that people can still build routines around systems that simulate attentiveness without sharing any human stake in the relationship.
Readers should treat claims about “deskilling” as a proposition to test, not a settled social-science finding. Notice what companion tools make easier, what they make less likely and whether the convenience is widening your relationships or replacing the inconvenient bits that make relationships real.
What to watch
- Whether companion apps publish evidence about long-term effects on users’ relationships and wellbeing.
- How products balance engagement targets against boundaries that discourage emotional dependency.
- Whether researchers can measure changes in empathy, conversation habits or social isolation over time.
- How users distinguish useful support from a machine optimised to sound as though it cares. The interesting argument is no longer whether chatbots can sound caring. It is whether repeated exposure to synthetic care changes what people expect from one another.
Discussion spark: Should companion-chatbot companies be required to prove that their products do not encourage emotional dependency, or is that responsibility ultimately down to users?
Sources and evidence
- How AI Chatbots Are 'Deskilling' Human Empathy (21 September 2026, 19:34 UTC)
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