We Can’t Help Treating AI Like It’s Human. But Should We?
We instinctively treat chatbots and robots like people, saying please, trusting their tone and sometimes growing attached. Drawing on TechCrunch’s reporting, Sherry Turkle’s new book Artificial Intimacy and MIT research, we explain why anthropomorphism is so hard to switch off, what the data on politeness and dependence shows, where the law now draws lines, and how businesses should design chatbots that do not exploit it.
