Comment by bflesch

A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears.

At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it.

It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction.

I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.