Chatbots: Synthetic Intimacy

At three in the morning, a teenage girl cannot stop thinking about a stranger’s comment on social media. She would like to ask her best friend for advice, but she does not want to wake her up. She picks up her phone and starts whispering. At eleven at night, another teenager is doing homework when an argument from the schoolyard comes back to mind, over and over again. He is trembling, wants to text his best friend for advice, but feels embarrassed. He too picks up his phone and starts whispering. Both turn to a synthetic confidant that will be there for them at odd hours and will not judge them. A confidant designed to generate emotional dependency. In two decades, the digital economy has undergone a huge transformation: it began with data, until social media platforms showed us that attention was the scarce resource everyone was competing for. Today, with the rise of chatbots, what is being monetized is our need to connect.

Read more

Article by Liliana Arroyo, Director of the Chair for Socially Responsible Digital Innovation (SoReDI) and professor and researcher in Esade’s Department of Society, Politics and Sustainability, published in Diari Ara.