Ai Promises Intimacy But Delivers Isolation

I keep a running list of books I think are useful for helping Christians understand technology and our relation to it. It includes works by both Christians and non-Christians. I mark titles I highly recommend with an asterisk. Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age are on that list with an asterisk.

I’ve now added her most recent volume, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. Like Turkle’s other books, it got an asterisk. Turkle is a clinical psychologist, professor of the social studies of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the founding director of the Initiative on Technology and Self.

For close to 40 years, she’s been researching and writing about the personal and societal effects of computer technologies. In earlier works, she focused on the harmful effects that the proliferation of (and growing preference for) text-based communication technologies (e.g., email, texts, messaging apps, social media) have had on us.

Artificial Intimacy shows what happens when we turn to artificial intelligence “that claims to care for us and proposes itself as a substitute for relationships with people as conversation partners, companions, even romantic counterparts” (xiii–xiv). She also makes a compelling case for building a society that prioritizes and promotes real relationships.

Relational Deskilling

In higher education, many of us are deeply concerned about deskilling due to outsourcing or off-loading cognitive labor to AI. Our students are forgetting how to think. Turkle’s main concern is relational deskilling—we’re forgetting how to talk to each other.

We’re forgetting how to talk to each other.

Texting and social media offered “the pleasures of companionship without the demands of friendship—the illusion of intimacy without the demands of reciprocity” (31). These means of communication “apprenticed us” and served as gateway drugs, ushering us from being comfortable communicating with people by way of machines to being comfortable (even preferring) talking to machines instead of people. According to Turkle, “First, we talked to each other. Then we talked to each other through machines. Now we talk directly to machines” (33).

Studies conducted by Harvard Business Review in 2025 and 2026 showed therapy and companionship as the top use of AI, appearing to confirm Turkle’s thesis. This serves as a warning.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm about AI. There are many questions about what kind of intelligence it’s capable of. However, fewer people are talking about how conversing with generative AI is changing the way we talk to other humans.

But deskilling assumes that a skill was possessed and subsequently lost. In some cases, especially that of children, the development of certain relational abilities could be stunted or prevented if they treat chatbots as confidants, counselors, grief counselors, friends, or personal agents in any sense. If we’re not careful, an AI-saturated world may create a population that has never learned how to relate deeply to other humans.

Counterfeit Empathy

Tech companies producing AI chatbots want to maximize user engagement with their products. Making them as humanlike as possible is one of the most effective means of accomplishing that end.

A program that refers to itself with pronouns like “I,” “my,” and “mine” is deceptive. Turkle calls such anthropomorphizing “the original sin of artificial intimacy.” Though chatbot makers warn users that their creations aren’t persons, Turkle warns that “everything about the experience implies, over and over again, ‘I am a person. I am your person’” (6).

Chatbots can simulate empathy, but it’s just mimicry. Settling for that counterfeit connection “turns us into behaviorists” for whom all that matters is the performance of empathy (12). Our understanding of love and intelligence is radically altered when we confuse their imitations for the real thing. “And as more and more people live this new reality,” Turkle notes, “that reconsideration affects us all” (105).

The frictionlessness and obsequiousness of chatbots casts a false vision of the good life that corrodes human relationships.

Chatbots always agree with us and affirm us. They always offer us their full, undivided attention. People force us to grapple with conflicting emotions, ambivalence, and complexity. Chatbots erode our ability to value other people because with AI, we don’t have to do this work. (121)

The danger of relational deskilling is real.

While Turkle maintains we’re all vulnerable to artificial intimacy, she rightly sounds an urgent call to protect our children from seeing computers as companions. “The trouble doesn’t begin when a chatbot says something explicitly harmful to a child,” Turkle argues, “it begins the moment a child starts to talk to a chatbot” (216). The danger is that children will never learn to rightly value real human relationships because the counterfeit versions are so much easier.

Theology Needed

Turkle’s research is an excellent starting point for Christians thinking about AI and its effects on human relationships, but it’s missing an important dimension. Her research included conversations with “philosophers, technologists, family members, students, strangers, and inanimate objects” (xvi). Theologians would have been a helpful addition to the list.

An AI-saturated world may create a population that has never learned how to relate deeply to other humans.

Christians should see the problem of ascribing personhood to chatbots as a dilution of the wonder of the imago Dei, but Turkle describes it primarily as warping an evolutionary response to “suggestions of empathy” (29). Her psychoanalytic perspective identifies significance in aspects of the human experience: “the role of profound attachment, the development of embodied selves, and our experience of sexuality and sociality.” She rightly notes, “Psychoanalytic ideas remind us of things beyond the reach of programs” (18). Yet evolutionary materialism can’t fully account for such things or why they matter.

If the counterfeits can become good enough, or even better, then why should we pursue real personal interactions? Christians have access to a far more compelling answer to that question because we know that all humans are made in God’s image. That’s why we’re commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves—a command that can’t apply to lines of code.

Nevertheless, readers don’t need to embrace Turkle’s naturalism to concur with her identification of a serious problem. Christians can and should heartily agree with her call to action: “Right now, the culture may be smitten with the idea of pretend conversation, but we have another choice: We can turn our attention to remaking the spaces in which the real thing can happen” (217).

Artificial Intimacy reminds us of the value of real human relationships and should inspire Christians to make our churches and homes places where those relationships can flourish.