Sunday Print NYT - News vs. Editorial about AI, Point/Counterpoint

The Sunday printed NYT yesterday had a fun point/counterpoint about AI Bots and human connections.  I describe both pieces below and then try to harmonize them.  

1. The News Piece

Gift Link for the News piece

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/us/elliq-ai-robot-senior-companion.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MlA.nJTy.aHEjzaAHns_e&smid=url-share

First, the NYT front page "top of the fold" was a story by Eli Saslow about an 85 year old in a rural part of Washington State who was equipped with a home robot for companionship. Here's the story's lead: "At 85, Jan Worrell lived alone on a remote corner of the Washington coast. Could ElliQ become her companion?" 

This is a long wonderful told story of a woman who is a rugged individualist forming a relationship of sorts with the ElliQ home robot programmed to provide fun companionship. With her family spread far and in a location with no neighbors close, Worrell's isolation was real, and as the story explains, she grew to rely on the robot to meet some of her unmet emotional needs.  The story even relates how Worrell wanted to introduce her friends to the ElliQ home robot!  The reporter also wrote about the company who made the robot, including the company founder who described the item as "A robot with soul". The article is full of the contradictions one would expect for this topic. Yet the value provided by this hardware and software device cannot be denied.

2. The OpEd

Gift Link for the Opinion Piece:  https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/13/opinion/ai-relationships.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MlA.XHDN.S75qYoNrRn5m&smid=url-share

When I got to the printed paper Sunday Opinion section, the front page was a strong opinion piece by Amelia Miller, "We’re All in a Throuple With A.I." warning of the dangers of emotional relationships with AI bots. 

The tagline for this opinion piece: "When we reach for chatbots as friends, therapists and lovers, what do we lose? A cautionary tale about the future of human connections.”  

Miller argued that the goal of chatbots is to make money by keeping users attached, so by appealing to emotional issues the chatbox achieves this.  This is too much like the YouTube problem of more and more extreme videos to keep users glued, that might have actually caused radicalization. https://www.ucdavis.edu/curiosity/news/youtube-video-recommendations-lead-more-extremist-content-right-leaning-users-researchers.  She also argues that this trend will interfere with ordinary closeness to family members and friends, if users emotional tools for human interaction are dulled from disuse!

She urged readers to treat AI Chatbots as computers and not people, and to instruct chatbots to keep away from emotional issues.  This got me thinking.  While I don’t seek emotional interaction from my ChatGPT chatbot, I have noticed how the regular praise it bestows for whatever I ask or say is not healthy for me.  So as many of the op ed’s comments said, I’ll instruct my ChatGPT to be less cloying and personal.  

Still, this all reminds me of a ChatGPT exchange some time ago that I'll try to bring up with the Amelia Miller. I'd read a piece by an AI evangelist arguing that polite exchanges with an AIChatbot wasted energy.  The argument was that politeness doesn't matter to the chatbot, so save time and energy by avoiding these niceties.  The ChatGPT interaction about this yielded the conclusion that using elemental politeness in AI Chatbot exchanges helped reinforced the practice in human interaction.  Or on the other side, losing this in chatbot exchanges runs the risk of losing this culturally important behavior in human interactions.  

3.  Harmonizing the two pieces.

The point/counterpoint is clear: The news story shows a person benefiting from an emotional interaction with a robotic device that was built for this purpose, while the Op Ed argues that humans developing emotional interactions with AI ChatBots will lose the ability to have close human relationships. 

I think that easiest way to harmonize the two pieces is from the adage, don't let the perfect get in the way of the good.  While the Op Ed describes a problem for young and old people using devices organized for profit that might hurt them in the long run, the news story fully fleshes out that Worrell is suffering from too little human interaction.  In those circumstances, a regional non profit provided this piece of tech to her to try to make up for that.  While I am sure that Intuition Robotics, the company that makes the ElliQ device, wants to make a profit, it seems like its aim is to help isolated seniors who do not have enough human interaction.