A Man Asked a Chatbot to Tell Him If He Was Emotionally Withholding

Brian, a man interviewed by MIT professor Sherry Turkle for her book on chatbots, asked his chatbot whether a woman had a point. Turkle calls it an extraordinary moment: Brian was asking an object with no emotions to tell him if he was emotionally withholding. “Speak to me about what you cannot experience,” she writes. Turkle’s broader concern is that when people mistake a machine’s empathy for the real thing, they may turn away from the people in their lives because those people seem insufficiently empathetic.