How AI Chatbots Are 'Deskilling' Human Empathy
When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle. Through talking directly to people in their own environments, whether they were in MUDs and early virtual chat spaces or Second Life and massive role-playing games, her work revealed endlessly interesting firsthand perspectives on lifestyles that people still found subversive, marginal, and at times perverse. The people she interviewed often said that digital worlds offered support, companionship, sexual satisfaction, gender play and freedom that the quote-unquote "real" world did not.
- ▪When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle.
- ▪Through talking directly to people in their own environments, whether they were in MUDs and early virtual chat spaces or Second Life and massive role-playing games, her work revealed endlessly interesting firsthand perspectives on lifestyle
- ▪The people she interviewed often said that digital worlds offered support, companionship, sexual satisfaction, gender play and freedom that the quote-unquote "real" world did not.
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| Original publisher | 404 Media |
| Canonical URL | https://www.404media.co/sherry-turkle-artificial-intimacy-podcast/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 19:33:32 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T19:33:49.174Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T19:33:49.174Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | zYijmi58tQ0u · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
When I first started writing about online cultures and subcultures almost 10 years ago, one of the first scholars I read on the subject of internet anthropology was Professor Sherry Turkle. Her earlier books, including The Second Self (published in 1984) and Life on the Screen (1995) became something like a model for my own writing and this kind of reporting— approaching the internet with an ethnographer's mindset and taking nonjudgemental documentation of how people are behaving and feeling in a given space, even if that space is digital.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at 404 Media.
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