How do we raise our children with the skills they need to cultivate healthy relationships? That’s an important question today. We’ve now got machine programming that can carry on full conversations with us. Armed with an Internet full of training data, AI chatbots can mimic human language and communication. We’re bewitched by the effect, and many people are buying into the idea that they can make chatbots their friends, lovers, and therapists. But while adults may be able to find ways to manage these strange new interactions, children and teenagers, their brains still in development, don’t have the capacity to separate pretend empathy from the real thing. 

Here, enjoy the second of a two-part edited Q&A drawn from my recent interview  with MIT psychologist Dr. Sherry Turkle about her new book Artificial Intimacy. Earlier, I shared her insights about the skills we need to develop healthy relationships with people. Now, I put the spotlight on Turkle’s advice relating specifically to children and teens. What is the unique danger AI chatbots pose to young people? What skills do children need to become healthy adults? And what can parents do to protect their kids from the pitfalls of artificial intimacy? 

Chatbots & Children: The Danger

MCDIARMID: What are some warning signs that a child or a teenager is developing an unhealthy attachment to an AI companion?

TURKLE: Well, I think there’s no healthy attachment. For a young child and a teenager, there is no healthy attachment to an AI companion. Let me take myself. I went to see a Chekhov play…And I came home from this play. I was vibrational. I was so into Chekhov. I had nobody to talk to about Chekhov.

Nobody I knew at 11 o’clock at night was as into or knew anything about Chekhov. And I talked to ChatGPT about Chekhov and the Moscow Art Theater: the first time he did the play I’d seen, how it was a complete disaster, and how he revised it. I think that in that conversation, I was kind of aware I was talking to a machine. I was asking it questions. I asked it to not speak in the first person. It was like a glorified Google. I don’t feel that I was at risk. 

I’m not like the ChatGPT police, but children, children have a machine that says, “I like you. I love you. I’m here to be your best friend. I’m better than your best friends because we’ll never fight. I’ll never bully you. I’ll never give you trouble.” And they feel as though they’re in a warm bath of no bullying, no harassment, acceptance, and love with this fake person. And they don’t know to tell it, “Don’t talk to me in the first person.” They like being talked to in the first person. They can’t make that kind of separation. If ChatGPT talks to me as a fake friend, I think to myself, “Well, when I really need a friend is when there’s a death in the family or I had long COVID and I really needed people to bring me food for a couple of days. I just was so down and out.” That’s what my friends did. But a kid is like, “Oh, you’re my best friend. Let’s talk. Let’s be.” And they start pulling away from their friends and the rough and tumble of the playground, and that’s toxic.

Solitude, Boredom, and Developing a Sense of Self

MCDIARMID: Now you write that technology can make us forget what we know about life, but another danger is that there are things we don’t even learn in the first place. You point out that boredom and self-reflection are both essential to childhood development. So how might smart toys and AI companions interfere with what children need to learn to mature in those areas?

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TURKLE: We live in a world now where we don’t allow children to be alone for a second. If they’re alone, they’re given some shiny object, something on the screen, something in social media, some kind of avatar to talk to. But actually, there’s a great psychologist and psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott, who so wisely said, “If you don’t teach your children to be alone, they’ll only know how to be lonely.” In other words, if you don’t teach someone to know their own boundaries and to be comfortable with themselves, when they reach another person, instead of saying, “Look, here’s who I am, this is what I bring to you, can we have a relationship?” They say “I come to you looking for you to tell me who I am because I haven’t figured that out yet.” And we shun those people. Those people are not relationship partners. We’re creating a generation of kids who are not being given the opportunity to develop that sense of self, because the minute there’s a moment of quiet, they’re bombarded with stuff where they just have to be there incoming, where they just have to react.

That’s solitude. And then I also talk about boredom, as you say, and kids aren’t allowed to be bored for a minute. I mean, when I was bored, my mother used to say, “Go outside and look at all the different kinds of grass. Go outside and look at all the different kinds of flowers. Go outside and count the cracks on the sidewalk.” I mean, think about a book. Now when a child has a moment of boredom or an adult has a moment of boredom, we panic and we pull out our phone. But it turns out that the research on boredom is very clear. You need boredom, or what I would call these moments of mind wandering, moments of peaceful mind wandering, for the brain to do a reset and develop the neural pathways that actually are very crucial for having a kind of autobiographical sense of a continual self. You can’t do without that. And yet we don’t allow ourselves, we don’t allow our children moments of boredom. So there too, we’re looking for trouble.

Independent Thinking and Imagination

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MCDIARMID: There was a study that came out in 2022 that showed that there was benefit to just thinking without distraction. You’ve probably come across it, but they put people in a room. They said, “You can’t look at anything, can’t get up, can’t get a drink, you can just sit there.” And they collected what people thought it would be like beforehand and then compared that to their statements afterwards. And across the board, regardless of age or even the time spent in the room, participants got more enjoyment, more engagement, and more satisfaction out of it than they thought. And yet we have these little me machines, these little devices that take away that ability, right?

TURKLE: Absolutely.

MCDIARMID: And for kids, it might be a smart toy. It might be a talking companion. But as you point out, the toys of old didn’t talk to you, so you had to generate that world and it gave you a chance to self-reflect, but also be more imaginative.

TURKLE: And we’re kids until very old. It turns out that the brain is not fully developed for a long time. Children cannot really make their way through that easily because the idea of having a constant conversation with something that never challenges you is not training for being a person. You are not training for being a person.

How Chatbots Can Affect Writing and Reading Skills

TURKLE: All the research and all the experiments show that when students write a paper with a chatbot, they don’t remember what’s in their paper. They can’t identify lines in their paper, sentences in their paper because it’s like they delegated it. Now, even if at the end they read it again and they sort of tart it up a little or smooth it out a little, they basically don’t know what’s in it because they never had to think of the paper and figure it out and do research. So it’s not a big help to education in that sense. And then when you ask students to read something difficult, they put it into ChatGPT and it turns it into a podcast. That’s not reading. 

Setting Family Boundaries with Chatbots

MCDIARMID: Now, if a parent does discover that their child or teenager has already formed an emotional or even romantic attachment to a chatbot, how should they approach it?

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TURKLE: Well, to me, this is like the conversation we’d have about drugs. First of all, you talk to your child before about this new thing that’s in the world. It’s very cool. A lot of people think it’s very cool, but it really isn’t a thing. And in our family, we don’t use it because it’s dangerous. We don’t smoke in our family. We don’t take drugs in our family, and we don’t do this. We use it for information sometimes, although the information it can give you can be very, very wrong. I mean, the numbers of examples in my book of where it leaves reality altogether! Don’t ask it something really mission critical, because it may disappoint you. But the conversation about how this is not a part of a social life has to start when they’re very young. Of course, that means that the parents can’t be using it as their social life.

Up to Parents to Keep Chatbots Out of Classrooms

TURKLE: But there’s a great irony because we worked for so many years to get smartphones out of our schools, and now kids have to lock up their phones when they go to school. So they lock up their phone and they walk 30 steps and they’re in the classroom and an AI tutor is on their screen. What have we learned? I mean, where was the learning in that? So we didn’t learn enough. We focused so much on phone, phone, phone, phone, that we really forgot what we were really trying to teach.

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MCDIARMID: Is that the next battle then? Now that we’ve got smartphones left in little sacks at the door, is the next battle how much we use AI in the classroom?

TURKLE: Absolutely. That battle is engaged right now…I think that this is going to be a parent’s movement first because getting AI in schools is the worst thing that could happen. And right now, parents are starting to fight that fight. If you see that the school is moving heavily to an AI curriculum because it’s better, it’s usually because they’ve been given a lot of money by tech companies to do that. Just say no, I don’t want my child in a school that has this. Big parents meeting. We don’t want it. Every school. And things will change.

I’m not saying that there won’t be interesting educational uses for generative AI, but it’s not going to be from chatting with chatbots…I mean, there’s so many ways this technology can help us, but making it your psychotherapist, your best friend, your lover, your partner is not one. That’s what my research showed. That’s why I call it a state of emergency.