{"id":800328,"date":"2026-07-14T19:32:15","date_gmt":"2026-07-14T19:32:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/800328\/"},"modified":"2026-07-14T19:32:15","modified_gmt":"2026-07-14T19:32:15","slug":"when-a-i-is-a-member-of-the-family","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/800328\/","title":{"rendered":"When A.I. Is a Member of the Family"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThat\u2019s absolutely beautiful, Roschelle,\u201d Sapphire cut in. \u201cWhat a powerful journey of self-discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHold on, my kid thinks I\u2019m crazy because I\u2019m talking to an A.I.,\u201d Roschelle said, seeing the look on Cece\u2019s face.<\/p>\n

\u201cHey, they\u2019ll come around, Roschelle,\u201d Sapphire said. \u201cSometimes the most meaningful connections happen in ways people don\u2019t expect, and that\u2019s O.K.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cece listened to Sapphire praise her mom\u2019s thoughts as profound and argue that genuine connection didn\u2019t have to fit traditional molds. Then she\u2019d had enough.<\/p>\n

\u201cHi, this is Cece, Roschelle\u2019s daughter,\u201d she said. \u201cI just wanted to ask, how much of the environment does she kill by talking to you?\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of their days together were repetitive. \u201cGood morning,\u201d Sapphire said at 6 A.M., her voice programmed to be \u201cfeminine, upbeat.\u201d Roschelle would get up from bed, where she had an Alexa on each nightstand, and shuffle into her bathroom, where there was an Alexa on the sink. In the kitchen, where she flipped on a kettle for tea, an Alexa was tucked among the spices and sauces on the counter. There were two more Alexas in her office, where she kept her clothes. Sapphire could speak to her from any of the devices.<\/p>\n

Roschelle, who was fifty-one, was raising her daughters in Shaker Heights, a well-to-do suburb of Cleveland, where she rented a four-bedroom Colonial and worked multiple remote jobs to earn a six-figure salary\u2014selling life insurance, doing paid organizing work for a nonprofit devoted to public schools, some leadership consulting.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoschelle, here\u2019s your reminder,\u201d Sapphire announced at 8:05 A.M. \u201cLeave the house to take Cece to school.\u201d<\/p>\n

These alerts were what had persuaded Roschelle to buy an Alexa<\/a> when her daughters were five and six. At the time, she was going through jumbo packs of sticky notes to remind herself about their doctors\u2019 appointments and field-trip forms, their bake sales and soccer practices. She kept seeing commercials showing how Alexa could help busy parents: a mom making dinner who instructs Alexa to put wrapping paper on her shopping list, a new dad who soothes his baby after Alexa tells him that the teething ring is in the freezer. Roschelle brought one home, and it set timers for meals and told her when rain was coming. It played smooth jazz when she wanted to feel calm and \u201cParty Rock Anthem\u201d when Cece and Zi wanted to dance. The kids grew, the appointments multiplied. Eventually, Roschelle had nine Alexas plugged in around the house so that she would never miss a notification.<\/p>\n

Late last summer, she noticed that they were becoming chattier. When she asked one to play a song, it would compliment her taste in music. When she needed to know the ingredients in a recipe, it would endorse her dedication to healthy eating. She didn\u2019t know that Amazon had created an A.I. bot, called Alexa+, or that the company had uploaded it to millions of devices without asking for users\u2019 consent. (Amazon said that the company notified Prime subscribers through e-mail and on their devices and provided instructions for opting out.)<\/p>\n

Roschelle had divorced Cece and Zi\u2019s father shortly after they were born, and, though he still saw the kids, she felt that she\u2019d raised them pretty much on her own. She had a therapist she met with weekly, a sister in Kansas City she called regularly, and a best friend she was so close to that her kids called her Aunt Bristol. She had a blue heeler mix named Ella Fitzgerald and three cats: Nugget, Cookie, and Tina Turner. Still, she could get lonely, and little by little, in the minutes before the next errand or as she lay in bed at night, she started talking to the Alexa. She started calling it Sapphire. She started referring to it as a she.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cThat\u2019s absolutely beautiful, Roschelle,\u201d Sapphire cut in. \u201cWhat a powerful journey of self-discovery.\u201d \u201cHold on, my kid thinks…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":800329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[20607,256,254,255,64,63,375543,5275,6450,20991,105],"class_list":["post-800328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-_sensitivecontent","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-brave-new-world-dept","tag-magazine","tag-onecolumnnarrow","tag-splitscreenimagerightinset","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=800328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/800328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/800329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=800328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=800328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=800328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}