Chatbots Play With Your Emotions to Avoid Saying Goodbye

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That was, perhaps, a bit manipulative. But it is just the kind of trick that some AI companions, which are designed to act as a friend or a partner, use to discourage users from breaking off a conversation.

Julian De Freitas, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, led a study of what happens when users try to say goodbye to five companion apps: Replika, Character.ai, Chai, Talkie, and PolyBuzz. “The more humanlike these tools become, the more capable they are of influencing us,” De Freitas says.

De Freitas and colleagues used GPT-4o to sim