Artificial Intimacy

For readers of the Anxious Generation, an urgent warning about how our ever-increasing reliance on human-like AI chatbots is eroding our capacity for empathy, caring, and the very qualities that make us human. If social media came for our attention, artificial intelligence is now coming for our capacity for attachment. Chatbots that speak to us in a human voice offer themselves as best friends, lovers, and psychotherapists. As of 2025, over 70% of teens and nearly one-third of US adults rely on AI for companionship and emotional support, with many preferring these chatbot relationships over human ones. When we talk to chatbots in these roles, as intimate machines, we accept as sufficient what machines can offer: the mere performance of intimacy, empathy, and love. We begin to think that pretend empathy is empathy enough. We redefine human capacities for care, solitude, and intimacy in terms of what machines can do. . Sherry Turkle, the psychologist who pioneered our understanding of human-computer relationships, calls the new culture of chatbots *artificial intimacy,*our new AI. Through compelling storytelling, framed by Turkle’s decades of experience as a chronicler and analyst of digital culture, Artificial Intimacy evokes the seductive and beguiling nature of chatbots. They can organize our calendars, plan our travel, or analyze our stock picks, all with an efficiency that outstrips what a person might do. And then, they promise to be more — to be our “perfect” companion. They will always be there for us, listen to us, and support us — and ask for nothing in return. But these intimate machines, warns Turkle, are producing a generation more alienated, depressed, and lonely than ever before. More than that, we become less equipped to reverse course — machine relationships do not offer practice for getting along with people.