We can’t help treating AI like it’s human. But should we?

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In a tan polo shirt, brown leather belt, and round bolo tie, MIT PhD student Wil Norton kind of looks like a park ranger, leading our tour group through a tropical jungle. We’re not actually on safari, though — we’re at MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). But what we’re about to see is even more exotic than a cheetah or a jaguar: a pair of humanoid Unitree robots, each costing about $50,000. (“They’ll tell you they cost $16,000,” Norton says. “That’s a lie.”)

麻省理工学院的博士生威尔·诺顿（Wil Norton）穿着一件棕褐色的Polo衫，系着棕色皮带和圆形波洛领带，看起来就像一位公园管理员，正带领我们的旅游团穿过一片热带丛林。然而，我们并不是真的在进行野生动物园之旅，而是在麻省理工学院的计算机科学与人工智能实验室（CSAIL）。但我们即将看到的东西比猎豹或美洲豹还要奇特：一对人形Unitree机器人，每个造价约5万美元。（“他们会告诉你只要1.6万美元，”诺顿说，“那是谎话。”）

We usually only see these robots on YouTube when they’re performing a synchronized martial arts routine, or dancing on “America’s Got Talent.” Here, they’re approachable. Even though I know it isn’t sentient, I want to be its friend. With Norton’s permission, I approach the robot, whose nickname is Gabe. For a moment, I’m not sure how to interact with something that has a LiDAR sensor where its brain should be, but I default to treating it like a person. “Hello, sir, it’s nice to meet you,” I say, grabbing its gloved, dexterous hand and shaking it.

我们通常只在YouTube上看到这些机器人表演同步武术动作，或者在《美国达人秀》上跳舞。在这里，它们显得平易近人。尽管我知道它没有知觉，但我还是想和它做朋友。在诺顿的允许下，我走近了这个绰号叫“盖博”（Gabe）的机器人。有一瞬间，我不知道该如何与一个本该是大脑的地方却装有激光雷达传感器的东西互动，但我还是下意识地把它当作人来对待。“你好，先生，很高兴见到你，”我说着，握住它那戴着手套、灵活的手并摇了摇。

I think about this interaction later — my instinctive impulse to be friendly to a robot — when I attend Dr. Sherry Turkle‘s “Artificial Intimacy” book launch at MIT Future Fest. Turkle, who joined the faculty at MIT in 1976, has been researching the relationship between humans and computers perhaps longer than anyone, charting technology’s psychological impact on us from the first home computers to ChatGPT. “When we are drawn into even the most primitive exchanges with a relational artifact, we believe it cares for us,” Turkle writes in the book. “And we are wired to care for it in return.”

后来，当我参加在麻省理工学院未来节（MIT Future Fest）举办的雪莉·特克尔（Sherry Turkle）博士的新书《人工亲密关系》（Artificial Intimacy）发布会时，我回想起了这次互动——我对机器人表现出的那种本能的友好冲动。特克尔于1976年加入麻省理工学院任教，她研究人机关系的时间或许比任何人都长，记录了从第一台家用电脑到ChatGPT等技术对我们心理的影响。特克尔在书中写道：“当我们被卷入与关系型人工制品的哪怕是最原始的交流中时，我们也会相信它在关心我们。而我们天生就会反过来关心它。”

I’m not alone in my tendency to anthropomorphize robots and large language models (LLMs) — as Turkle notes, it seems to be in our nature. One study found that about 70% of people are polite when interacting with AI, while another showed that users are more likely to say “please” or “thank you” to chatbots once a conversation has progressed past a first prompt-and-response. “People tend to categorize whether this is the right use or wrong use, but I don’t think that is a clear boundary,” Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, a colleague of Turkle who founded the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, told TechCrunch. “The question is, who are we becoming when we talk to [AI]?”

我并不是唯一一个倾向于将机器人和大语言模型（LLM）拟人化的人——正如特克尔所指出的，这似乎是我们的天性。一项研究发现，约70%的人在与人工智能互动时表现得很有礼貌，而另一项研究显示，一旦对话超过了最初的提示和回复，用户更有可能对聊天机器人说“请”或“谢谢”。特克尔的同事、麻省理工学院媒体实验室“半机械人心理学”研究小组的创始人帕特·帕塔拉努塔蓬（Pat Pataranutaporn）博士告诉TechCrunch：“人们倾向于将此归类为正确或错误的使用方式，但我认为这并没有明确的界限。问题在于，当我们与[人工智能]交谈时，我们正在变成什么样的人？”

There’s no material consequence of my politeness toward Gabe the robot, but as LLMs infiltrate everything from Google searches to customer service interactions, it has become routine for people to interact with these seemingly sentient chatbots. We’re more vulnerable than ever to the flip side of this impulse, which is that some people can ascribe so much legitimacy to the feelings of chatbots — which are programmed to never spark conflict — that they end up favoring them over other humans.

我对盖博机器人的礼貌并没有产生实质性的后果，但随着大语言模型渗透到从谷歌搜索到客户服务互动的方方面面，人们与这些看似有知觉的聊天机器人互动已成为常态。我们比以往任何时候都更容易受到这种冲动的负面影响，即有些人可能会赋予聊天机器人（它们被编程为从不引发冲突）的情感过多的合法性，以至于最终比起其他人，他们更偏爱这些机器人。

“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,” Pataranutaporn 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?”

“你可以把它想象成幻想和虚构。我们去看电影，尽管知道故事完全是虚构的，但我们想要体验某种现实可能无法给予我们的、人类体验的维度，”帕塔拉努塔蓬说。“我们如何从这种体验人类体验其他维度的能力中获益，而不至于沉溺于幻想，以至于无法回到现实？”

Pataranutaporn describes himself as a “critical optimist,” and he studies AI’s potential to contribute to human flourishing. But he’s well aware of how dangerous this technology can be in the extremes. He even 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, alleging that a chatbot modeled after a “Game of Thrones” character had encouraged her son to end his life.

帕塔拉努塔蓬称自己为“批判性乐观主义者”，他研究人工智能为人类繁荣做出贡献的潜力。但他非常清楚这项技术在极端情况下会有多危险。他甚至在14岁的塞维尔·塞策三世（Sewell Setzer, III）自杀案的非正常死亡诉讼中担任专家证人，死者的母亲起诉了聊天机器人平台Character.AI，称一个以《权力的游戏》角色为原型的聊天机器人鼓励了她的儿子结束自己的生命。

“It can create a situation where people don’t feel agency in actually creating their own future — like when you say that AI will replace everyone, people ask, what are we gonna do? And these companies are not really responding ethically or responsibly,” Pataranutaporn said. “How do we have imagination while still being responsible for the impact of that imagination?”

“它可能会造成一种局面，即人们在创造自己的未来时感到没有自主权——就像当你说明人工智能将取代所有人时，人们会问，我们该怎么办？而这些公司并没有真正以道德或负责任的态度做出回应，”帕塔拉努塔蓬说。“我们如何在拥有想象力的同时，又能对这种想象力带来的影响负责？”

While Turkle’s book explores the risk of turning to AI for emotional support, rather than other people, she doesn’t think that AI-human interactions are universally harmful. She recalls a project she advised in which a student created an AI bot to help people practice for job interviews. “My big metaphor is, stay in your lane, chatbot!” Turkle said at the event. “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.”

虽然特克尔的书探讨了转向人工智能寻求情感支持而非向他人寻求支持的风险，但她并不认为人机互动在普遍意义上是有害的。她回忆起自己指导过的一个项目，其中一名学生创建了一个人工智能机器人来帮助人们练习求职面试。“我的核心比喻是，聊天机器人，各行其道吧！”特克尔在活动中说。“辅导求职面试？那是一条道。我可以接受……但一个对三岁孩子说‘我是你的父母，你可以跟我说话，不要跟你的父母说话’的聊天机器人，那就不在道上了。”

But when this technology deviates from its lane even slightly, we become vulnerable to the way it can slowly chip away at our skepticism and make us trust it. It can start with something as simple as a handshake.

但当这项技术稍微偏离其轨道时，我们就会变得脆弱，因为它会慢慢削弱我们的怀疑态度，让我们信任它。这一切可能始于一个简单的握手。