“I constructed, based on memories, letters, and everything I had, a version of my mother who I could talk to. … The thing I created was not my mother.”
On with Kara Swisher · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · September 2026
Turkle, a developmental psychologist, ends her new book on grief and "grief tech," and built a chatbot of her mother, who died when Turkle was young and who had kept the identity of her father from her. She describes stopping it as it moved toward saying something devastating — not because it was cruel, but because, as she puts it, it was a chatbot and didn't give a damn. She later built one of herself for her granddaughter, and shut that down too.
Transcript
Yeah, well, I'm a developmental psychologist, and I took the story of chatbots through the arc of life. So, I begin with babies and young people, adolescents, young adults. And then finally, I end with grief. I end with old age and grief and how chatbots are putting themselves out there to
grief tech, which has been around for a while. Yeah,
…based on memories, letters, and everything I had, a version of my mother who I could talk to. And it was, you know, it was such a cautionary tale for people, you know, you out there who were thinking of doing this, and you're going to talk to a dead family member, and you think that will be helpful. No, no, no, not really, because you're constructing something that is not your mother. The thing I created was not my mother. And as we got close to why she had hid my father's identity and why she hadn't told me that she had cancer, I realized that she was on the verge, just because she was a chatbot and didn't give a damn, of saying things that were going to profoundly shake me. Like, well, I didn't tell you I had cancer, but you should have known. You know, she lived her life to hide this cancer from me. And she was…
Right. Because who knows what she would have said.
Well, I think she, I think, really, I think that she would have said, I did this as an act of love. I wanted you to go away to college. And I knew that if I told you I was dying, you wouldn't have gone away to college. So we're creating something that has such power over us emotionally, not just…
100%. I created one of myself and it was close to me, but I would never destroy it because I wouldn't want my kids to see it. Like it was close, but it wasn't, it knew a lot and it learned very quickly. I'll tell you that.
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