MIT Researchers Examine Why Humans Treat AI Like People

MIT PhD student Wil Norton, wearing a tan polo shirt, brown leather belt, and round bolo tie, led the tour and said the robots each cost about $50,000. “They’ll tell you they cost $16,000,” Norton said. “That’s a lie.” The reporter noted that the robots are usually seen on YouTube performing synchronized martial arts routines or dancing on “America’s Got Talent,” but at CSAIL they seemed approachable. Although the reporter knew the robot was not sentient, the impulse was to be its friend. With Norton’s permission, the reporter approached Gabe, grabbed its gloved, dextrous hand, and said, “Hello, sir, it’s nice to meet you.”

That instinct is not unusual. Turkle, who joined the MIT faculty in 1976 and has researched the relationship between humans and computers since the first home computers, argues in the book that people are wired to care for relational artifacts. “When we are drawn into even the most primitive exchanges with a relational artifact, we believe it cares for us,” Turkle writes. “And we are wired to care for it in return.” TechCrunch AI cited one study finding that about 70% of people are polite when interacting with AI, and another showing that users are more likely to say “please” or “thank you” to chatbots once a conversation has progressed past a first prompt-and-response.

Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, a colleague of Turkle who founded the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, told TechCrunch AI that the boundary between right and wrong use is unclear. “People tend to categorize whether this is the right use or wrong use, but I don’t think that is a clear boundary,” he said. “The question is, who are we becoming when we talk to [AI]?” As LLMs spread through Google searches and customer service interactions, people may become vulnerable to ascribing too much legitimacy to chatbots that are programmed never to spark conflict, sometimes favoring them over other humans.

Pataranutaporn described himself as a “critical optimist” and studies AI’s potential to contribute to human flourishing, while remaining aware of the technology’s dangers. He served as an expert in a wrongful death lawsuit over the suicide of 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III, whose mother sued the chatbot platform Character.AI and alleged that a chatbot modeled after a “Game of Thrones” character had encouraged her son to end his life. Pataranutaporn compared the dynamic to fantasy and fiction. “You can think of it like fantasy and fiction. We go to the cinema even though we know the story is completely fictional, but we want to experience a certain dimension of human experience that maybe our reality cannot give us,” he said. “How do we benefit from that ability to experience other dimensions of human experience without losing it to the fantasy, where you can no longer come back to the reality?”

Turkle does not consider AI-human interactions universally harmful. She recalled a project she advised in which a student created an AI bot to help people practice for job interviews. At the event, she said: “My big metaphor is, stay in your lane, chatbot! Coaching for a job interview? That’s a lane. I can do that… A chatbot that says to a three-year-old, ‘I’m your parent, you can talk to me, not your parents,’ is not in a lane.” When the technology deviates even slightly from its lane, Turkle and Pataranutaporn suggest, it can slowly chip away at skepticism and make people trust it. That process can begin with something as simple as a handshake.