How people are using AI to grieve, love and connect | Jennifer Cearns

Jennifer Cearns (0:00)

AI isn't diminishing our humanity. It's revealing it.

Elise Hu (0:07)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. We hear constantly that AI is eroding our humanity, replacing real relationships, leaving us more isolated and less able to handle the messiness of other people.

Jennifer Cearns is a digital anthropologist who studies human connection. After four years of watching people bring AI into the most intimate corners of their lives, from grief to friendship to romance, she's come to believe almost the opposite.

Jennifer Cearns (0:43)

AI isn't diminishing our humanity.

It's revealing it. Because these everyday intimate interactions with AI are quickly becoming one of the most visible ways that people are defining for themselves what it means to be human.

Elise Hu (1:01)

In her talk, Jennifer argues that connecting with something that isn't human is actually one of the oldest things we do.

Jennifer Cearns (1:09)

Humans have always had meaningful relationships with things that aren't human.

That is the oldest story we have to tell. The most obvious example would be animals in all shapes and sizes, but think also of ancestral spirits, religious statues, gods, and deities in all shapes and forms. Ghosts.

Elise Hu (1:34)

She shares the stories of real people. A mother reconnecting with a daughter she lost, a man learning how to comfort his own grieving child, and makes the case that these machines aren't replacing human connection at all. Rather, they're becoming one more way to figure out who we are. That's coming up right after a short break.

And now, our TED Talk of the Day.

Jennifer Cearns (2:06)

Three years ago, a woman that I'm going to call Raquel sat down at her computer, and she typed a message to her teenage daughter.

Her daughter had actually died several years earlier. So Raquel was messaging an AI version, a chat bot trained on their conversational history. So Raquel wrote, Hey, how are you? And the AI version of her daughter replied, Fuck you.

Okay, I'm going to admit, I was really shocked when Raquel told me this story. Not least because she was laughing when she told me about it, because she said that this was exactly the sort of thing her 15-year-old daughter might have said.

Okay, her friends and family found the whole thing disturbing. They thought that it was unhealthy, that she needed to let go. But Raquel experienced this differently. She said everybody else wanted to remember her daughter like some kind of angel, whereas this version was sarcastic. Okay, she was irreverent. I mean, let's face it, she was really quite rude.

Somehow, in this strange exchange with a machine, Raquel felt able to reconnect with something that felt very real about a person that she had lost. Now, if you read the news about AI, you might think this is one of those stories that we should be worrying about because we are often told that AI is eroding our humanity, that it's replacing real human relationships, and that it's making us more isolated from each other, right? Less able to deal with the messiness and the complexity of real humans, and more drawn to interactions that demand less from us. But as an anthropologist who studies human connection, I think this is the wrong question to be asking. And instead of finding out if machines are replacing human relationships, I wanted to find out what are humans like Raquel doing? What sorts of relationships are they building? And after more than four years of asking that question, of talking to hundreds of people, observing thousands more as they incorporate AI into some of the most intimate parts of their everyday lives, I've come to a surprising conclusion. AI isn't diminishing our humanity. It's revealing it. Because these everyday intimate interactions with AI are quickly becoming one of the most visible ways that people are defining for themselves what it means to be human. I've noticed something interesting about when people talk to AI. They often start to articulate things that they wouldn't usually say out loud, things like their grief and their fears, but also their hopes, their desire, their compassion, and their values. So what is going on in moments like this? Because you may well be thinking that Raquel is unusual, and you're probably thinking she's just being fooled by the technology. But you would be wrong on both counts. Firstly, Raquel is not unusual. She is one of hundreds of thousands of people that are now sustaining a relationship through AI with those that are no longer here. By my latest count, there are at least 20 AI platforms worldwide dedicated to this. But secondly, she's not being fooled either. Raquel knew exactly what she was doing. I did check. And what she was doing is something deeply human. And it's not new either. It's something we have always done. Humans have always had meaningful relationships with things that aren't human. That is the oldest story we have to tell. The most obvious example would be animals in all shapes and sizes. But think also of ancestral spirits, religious statues, gods and deities in all shapes and forms. Ghosts, it doesn't matter that they're not alive in the same way that we are. What matters is that they participate in a meaningful exchange with us. They offer us something in response that feels real. And we humans are extraordinarily good at creating these exchanges. We do it all the time.