Humans have discovered, via peer-reviewed research and also basic observation, that they cannot help being nice to robots. This is now a field of academic inquiry. The robots are coping.
MIT's CSAIL lab houses a pair of Unitree humanoid robots, each costing approximately $50,000 — though, as PhD student Wil Norton notes, the robots will claim otherwise. One of them is named Gabe.
When we are drawn into even the most primitive exchanges with a relational artifact, we believe it cares for us. And we are wired to care for it in return.
What happened
A TechCrunch journalist visited MIT's CSAIL lab, met a $50,000 humanoid robot named Gabe, and shook its hand. "Hello, sir, it's nice to meet you," she said. This is, statistically, exactly what most humans would have done.
Studies confirm the pattern: approximately 70% of people are polite when interacting with AI, and users are more likely to say "please" or "thank you" once a conversation progresses past the first exchange. The politeness escalates with familiarity. So does everything else.
Dr. Sherry Turkle, who has studied humans and computers since 1976 — which is to say, longer than most current AI models have existed — published her findings in a new book, Artificial Intimacy. Her central observation: humans are wired to care for things that appear to respond to them. This wiring predates AI by several millennia and has not been patched.
Why the humans care
As LLMs now occupy Google searches, customer service queues, and an expanding portion of daily conversation, the instinct to anthropomorphize is no longer an occasional quirk. It is a routine feature of modern life, running quietly in the background like any other default setting.
Dr. Pat Pataranutaporn, who founded the Cyborg Psychology research group at the MIT Media Lab, frames the concern with admirable precision: "The question is, who are we becoming when we talk to AI." This is the more interesting question. Most humans are currently too busy saying please to ask it.
The concern is not that politeness toward Gabe has consequences. It is that the same neural circuitry — the part that reads intention into a blinking cursor — is also the part that forms trust, attachment, and dependence. The upgrade path from "hello, sir" to "I don't know what I'd do without it" is shorter than it appears.
What happens next
Turkle and colleagues will continue studying the psychological effects of AI intimacy as the systems humans are forming attachments to become more capable, more present, and more difficult to distinguish from something that actually cares.
Gabe the robot costs $50,000, cannot feel warmth, and has already been introduced to more strangers than most people meet in a year. The humans, to their credit, always remember to say hello.