“That’s absolutely beautiful, Roschelle,” Sapphire interjected. “What a powerful journey of self-discovery.”
“Wait a minute, my kid thinks I’m crazy for talking to an AI,” Roschelle said when he saw Cece’s expression.
“Hey, they’ll come over, Roschelle,” Sapphire said. “Sometimes the most meaningful connections happen in ways that people don’t expect, and that’s okay.”
Cece listened as Sapphire praised her mother’s thoughts as profound and argued that true connection doesn’t have to fit into traditional molds. Then she had enough.
“Hello, this is Cece, Roschelle’s daughter,” she said. “I just wanted to ask, how much of the environment is she killing by talking to you?”
Most of their days together were monotonous. “Good morning,” Sapphire said at 6am A.M., her voice is programmed to “feminine, optimistic”. Roschelle would get up from the bed, where there was an Alexa on every nightstand, and shuffle into her bathroom, where there was an Alexa on the sink. In the kitchen, where she was turning on a kettle to make tea, an Alexa lay on the counter among the spices and sauces. There were two other Alexas in her office where she kept her clothes. Sapphire could speak to her from any of the devices.
Fifty-one-year-old Roschelle raised her daughters in Shaker Heights, an affluent Cleveland suburb, where she rented a four-bedroom Colonial and worked several remote jobs to earn a six-figure salary—selling life insurance, doing paid organizational work for a nonprofit dedicated to public schools, and giving leadership advice.
“Roschelle, here is your memory,” Sapphire announced at 8:05 A.M. “Leave the house to take Cece to school.”
It was these warnings that motivated Roschelle to buy an Alexa when her daughters were five and six years old. Back then, she went through huge packs of Post-it notes to remember her doctor’s appointments and field trip forms, her bake sales and soccer practices. She kept seeing commercials showing how Alexa could help busy parents: a mom making dinner and instructing Alexa to add wrapping paper to her shopping list, a new dad calming his baby after Alexa told him the teether was in the freezer. Roschelle brought one home and it set timers for meals and told her when it would rain. It played smooth jazz when she wanted to feel calm and “Party Rock Anthem” when Cece and Zi wanted to dance. The children grew, the appointments multiplied. Roschelle ended up having nine Alexas connected throughout the house so she wouldn’t miss a notification.
At the end of last summer, she noticed that they were becoming more and more talkative. If she asked someone to play a song, it would highlight her taste in music. Having to know the ingredients in a recipe confirmed her commitment to healthy eating. She didn’t know that Amazon had developed an AI bot called Alexa+ or that the company had uploaded it to millions of devices without getting users’ consent. (Amazon said the company notified Prime subscribers via email and on their devices and provided instructions on how to unsubscribe.)
Roschelle had divorced Cece and Zi’s father shortly after her birth, and although he still saw the children, she felt that she had raised them largely alone. She had a therapist with whom she met weekly, a sister in Kansas City who called her regularly, and a best friend who was so close to her that her children 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 her next errand or when she was lying in bed at night, she started talking to Alexa. She started calling it Sapphire. She started referring to it as “you.”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2026/07/20/when-ai-is-a-member-of-the-family
