Pioneers of AI: Why AI conversations are always one-sided

Rana El-Kalyubi said she uses AI as a personal confidant, but the conversation distinguished emotional trust in a person from using a chatbot as a safe place to explore thoughts. A chatbot can act like an efficient, questioning journal, helping someone unpack feelings, including around relationships, without necessarily giving sound relationship advice. Charles Duhigg described many AI exchanges as sophisticated but one-sided: the system can be a foil for discovering information, yet users do not believe they can change it, impress it, or make it feel their emotions. Calling this interaction a relationship may overstate what it is; “a sophisticated diary” may be a better description.

Duhigg separated practical conversations about plans or problems from emotional conversations seeking empathy and social conversations about relationships. People often miss one another when they expect different kinds of exchanges: someone who wants to vent and feel heard may become more upset when offered solutions. Duhigg recalled complaining about work to his wife and reacting badly when she responded with advice. Listening, he said, means demonstrating that you are processing what the other person says, through follow-up questions and by building on their ideas. A machine can produce back-and-forth, but that alone does not provide the reciprocal feedback through which people sense their effect on each other.

Vulnerability involves sharing something another person could judge. Trust can grow when the listener withholds judgment or shares vulnerability in return. AI may feel safe because it cannot choose to weaponize a disclosure, but that safety is different from trusting a person who could attack you and chooses not to. Duhigg also described neural entrainment: during conversation, people’s thoughts can align, and their heart rates and breathing can become similar. He associated this alignment with feeling closer and hearing each other with greater fidelity. He said practical, emotional, and social conversations involve different brain regions, and that entrainment can occur through email, Slack, and text messages as well as face-to-face exchanges.

For difficult conversations, Duhigg recommended acknowledging the awkwardness and anxiety, setting ground rules, and agreeing on the question the conversation should resolve. Treating the issue as something both people are solving changes the frame from “you versus me” to “us versus the problem.” By contrast, “kitchen sinking”—turning a dispute about one issue into a fight about everything—can damage relationships. AI can help someone rehearse a difficult conversation and clarify what they want to say, though it may not predict the other person’s response well. Duhigg said people are poor at forecasting how conversations will go but are almost always happier afterward; emotional and social skills are generally robust, and practice can help people who avoid emotional exchanges.

Duhigg said AI can often distinguish an emotional conversation from a request for practical advice and imitate some behaviors of a “super communicator.” But it lacks subtle facial and vocal cues, decades of shared history, and the ability to take human emotional risks. He described AI as a sophisticated simulacrum of the world that can seem conscious, while saying he does not know whether it is conscious. Philosophers disagree, he noted, about whether a system that gives sensible answers in Chinese without understanding the symbols has a form of consciousness or is merely using resources cleverly.

Online communication also requires attention to how messages are read. Duhigg said polished writing is no longer a reliable signal that an email deserves attention in the AI era. He described his own email to Rana as a genuine connection because it referred to a specific episode and expressed curiosity in his informal style. He recommended responding to the sender’s actual points, avoiding sarcasm in text, and using politeness online. A study of Wikipedia editors found that adding one “please” and one “thank you” lowered the temperature of a conversation by about 30%.