Who Do We Become When We Talk to Machines?

In recent years, programs (robots and chatbots) built on generative AI have offered themselves as companions that care—presented, for example, as potential coaches, psychotherapists, and romantic companions—as artificial intimacy, our new AI. A study of users of these programs makes it clear that adjacent to the question of what these programs can do is another: What are they doing to us—for example, to the way we think about human intimacy, agency, and empathy?