A Single Mom, Her Daughters, and Their Chatbots

The Ogbujis and their Amazon Echo. | Photograph by Stephanie Mei-Ling for The New Yorker

Last fall, Jessica Contrera, who was then an award-winning reporter at the Washington Post, decided to pursue a story about how A.I. is changing family life. She wrote a short note describing the idea and shared it with schools, libraries, youth organizations, and parenting groups in Ohio, where she lives. Jessica interviewed dozens of teens and parents—including Roschelle Ogbuji, a single mother of two in Shaker Heights, who called Jessica and described a funny thing that had happened just the other day. She’d been having a conversation with a bot in her home office late at night when one of her daughters burst in and demanded to know why she was talking to A.I.Jessica went to see the Ogbujis. She then spent months visiting Roschelle and her two daughters, Cece and Zi, and observing how each of them interacted with a variety of A.I.-powered apps and devices at home, at work, and at school. In February, the Post announced that it was laying off nearly a third of its employees—including Jessica, who contacted The New Yorker to say that she was working on a story that she thought might interest us.The first time that I spoke to Jessica about the piece, it was obvious to me how carefully and thoughtfully she had reported the story, paying attention not only to how Roschelle, Cece, and Zi relied on A.I., but also to how they relied on one another, and on the other people in their lives. Jessica understood that the piece had to be about those relationships—and the ways that this new technology was affecting them, sometimes unexpectedly. It would describe how a teen with autism and agoraphobia chatted with A.I. while isolating from others, and how a mom might try to coax her into the wider world. It would describe how a high-school kid who was skeptical of A.I. found it encroaching on seemingly every part of her life. It would describe how a parent raising two kids on her own found solace in a chatbot as she handled everyday trials and triumphs, and life-altering tragedy.It would do all this not by explaining A.I. to the reader or presenting statistics on its use among parents and children, but by simply narrating episodes in the life of one small family in Shaker Heights. The resulting piece is a testament to the power of sensitive, patient reporting.Read or listen to the story »Editor’s PickHow “Piss Christ” Became a Culture-War BombAndres Serrano’s photograph of a crucifix immersed in a container of urine triggered a conflict over the National Endowment for the Arts that was less a battle for America’s soul than a battle for the Republican Party’s soul, Louis Menand writes. Read or listen to the story »More Top StoriesSpeaking of families using A.I.: Jessica Winter’s latest column is about how the A.I. “family assistant” is bridging the household-labor divide between women and their husbands.Bill McKibben has an idea for the Democrats in 2028: candidates for President should consider naming, and campaigning with, their Vice-Presidential pick from Day One.The skies over New York City are hazy today, owing to the smoke blowing down from Canadian wildfires. In 2023, when the city turned a terrifying orange, Carolyn Kormann wrote about why these events are so hard to forecast.Argentina is headed back to the World Cup final, but Ishaan Tharoor, a lifelong fan of the team, has fallen out of love.“Her son has a memory of her flat on her back on her bed, in a white nightgown, a type of inert mother he can sometimes be calmed by.” Diane Williams’s “Why Would That Help?” is a moving new entry in our bite-size Flash Fiction series.The most clicked item in yesterday’s newsletter was Richard Brody’s review of “The Odyssey.”