“Oh, stop that, you’re making me blush,” the raspy voice said, laughing in compliment. Barret Zoph, who had paid the compliment, looked pleased. As it should be: Zoph represents OpenAI, the company behind the voice.
ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI’s most recent chatbot iteration, is not an improvement to appear intelligent, but an improvement to appear emotional. “We envision the future of interaction between us and machines,” promised Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer.
ChatGPT-4o is just one in a wave of new conversational AI, including the rollout of Meta AI last month. “By the end of the decade, I think many people will be talking to AIs frequently throughout the day,” Mark Zuckerberg predicted in his release. Zuckerberg’s claim (as self-aggrandizing as it may be) echoes much of the research on chatbots. A 2022 study published in Computers in Human Behavior claims that these conversational AI technologies “may meet some of the same needs as human knowledge” and could “soon provide personalized social support to a variety of users.”
As major language models improve, Zuckerberg and others suggest, humans will increasingly enjoy interacting with them — a shift that could even quell the “loneliness epidemic” identified by U.S. Surgeon General Vivek H .Murthy. According to this line of thinking, technical innovation is the only thing standing in the way of consistent and fulfilling human-AI interaction.
However, the longer history of human communication suggests another factor: expectations we bring to these interactions, shaped by over 100 years of conversations with and through machines. Ever since the Victorian telegraph created real-time long-distance conversations, humans have attempted to imagine the person who generated the words they read. These imaginations created criteria of authenticity that we bring today to our interactions with chatbots and which transcend the precision of the LLM. I don’t know if chatbot conversations will ever satisfy human solitude, but to understand their potential, we need to see how this historical context has shaped our very human interpretations of technology.
The diffusion of telegraph lines in the middle of the 19th century presented a new possibility: two people could have a synchronous conversation hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. They may already know each other and enjoy this quicker form of communication, or they may be complete strangers. It is this last possibility which has captured the public imagination.
Telegraph operators were often women, and this new form of communication raised the specter of what we today call catfishing: luring someone into a relationship by misrepresenting oneself. The telegraph opened the way to innovative opportunities for women’s independence and, with it, new indicators – and a new urgency – for differentiating fact from fiction.
For example, a headline in the February 13, 1886 issue of the trade journal Electrical World warned of “the dangers of hard-wired love.” Maggie McCutcheon, a young telegraph operator from Brooklyn, “was flirting” with Frank Frisbie, according to the article. But McCutcheon’s father discovered that Frisbie was married and had a family in Pennsylvania. The article details the father’s attempts to keep McCutcheon away from the wires that allow him to communicate with Frisbie, and McCutcheon’s determination to find his way to a telegraph machine.
McCutcheon’s father attempts to control her by sending her to the Catskill Mountains. He fires her from her job in his telegraph office and drags her to a friend’s house, threatening her with violence. There is little mention of Frisbie other than his supposed family, who live conveniently far away. Much like a conversational AI, it remains disembodied, amorphous, present only in and through the telegraph machine.
The key points of this short report are found in popular fiction of the time. Often called “techno-romances”, these stories and novels develop the possibilities offered by the device: by eliminating the traps of beauty, status and family, the telegraph makes it possible to really know someone and to be known in return? Or does it introduce a new type of counterfeiting, the possibility of impersonating anyone, without any body of evidence?
Ella Cheever Thayer’s bestselling 1879 novel Wired Love: A Romance in Dots and Dashes suggests that both may be true. Recounting the acquaintance of two young telegraph operators, Clem and Nathalie, it shows how a bond can be formed with simple exchanges of words. But that doesn’t mean expectations evaporate for the body on the other end of the line. In the middle of the novel, Clem shows up unexpectedly at Nathalie’s office. Far from the handsome man she imagined, he struts with an “air of cheap confidence” and shows off his trinkets, reeking of cheap cologne, his hair coated with bear grease. Nathalie is not only horrified: she feels cheated.
And it turns out she was. This visit was just a prank on the part of another telegraph operator, who was listening to communications. Ultimately, the real Clem emerges and the couple’s love survives the disembodied sons’ transition to everyday life. The possibility of a hoax remains, but the novel ends by confirming the validity of techno-romance: a true connection transcends material limitations and can only occur in words exchanged, unseen.
Published more than 20 years later, Henry James’ short story “In the Cage” offers a more uplifting tale. At its center, an anonymous young telegraph operator watches as the beautiful and married Lady Bradeen sends a flurry of telegrams, hoping that no one will notice the messages addressed to the dashing Captain Everard. But the narrator – technologically savvy and, by proxy, considering herself an informed reader – discerns the clandestine love affair.
It might seem that disembodied communication wins once again, but the story takes a turn. Lady Bradeen’s husband dies and she urges Captain Everard to marry her, despite his loss of interest and looming debts. The telegraph operator is shocked by what is revealed to him about the crude realities of upper-class existence. These are no longer scraps of information transmitted by wire, these lives take on a personal form, and they seem sordid and deficient. The romance of the telegraph seduced both Lady Bradeen and the telegraph operator, but this seduction was temporary and disappointing. The short story ends with the telegraph operator leaving her “dreams and delusions” to “return to reality”.
Although the telegraph has long been replaced, current interactions with chatbots are similar to early wired interactions: they are also disembodied communications that occur solely through language. As in 19th century, when new technologies are introduced, we must reconfigure our standards of trust. The more human-looking the chatbot is, the harder it can be to keep in mind that the person you’re talking to doesn’t have feelings for you or anyone else.
As telegraph users have discovered, with new possibilities for connection come new possibilities for misinformation, unhealthy addiction, even fraud. An authentic conversation with an AI – whose name is artificial – should be different from an authentic conversation with a person. This is not just a skillful imitation, but a completely unprecedented type of interaction.
Preliminary research suggests that over-reliance on conversational AI for social flourishing may lead to “decompetence,” a loss of the ability to connect in person because chatbots are programmed to continue the interaction. Creating chatbots to mirror a human conversation can lead to a one-sided belief in the authenticity of the relationship – an unusual form of fraud in which users simply harm each other.
The past informs the assumptions and expectations we bring to conversational AI. So, with this knowledge, we can establish historically informed criteria for evaluating the authenticity of a virtual relationship. But unlike the telegraph, there is no longer a human on the other end of the line. We need to re-evaluate these mediated communications rather than viewing them as direct substitutes for human contact. The techno-romance of our time is not with a stranger on the other end of the phone. Now the thread only leads to a server farm.