Thanks to their remarkable conversation-like abilities, and to their always complacent and hyper-polite answers, and also thanks to a degree of loneliness which also due to digitalised communication is far too high at the moment in our society, chatbot models like ChatGPT are used by people as confidants, as “friends”, and even as “lovers”. This humanisation of these conversational agests is common, but we should never forget they are just machines, they have no emotions, no conscience, no life experience, no feelings, no empathy. Their language output is just the result of a computationally intense training process. ChatGPT is a tool, not your friend!
