The Same Reason We Cry At Movies May Explain Why So Many Trust Chatbots

Why People Trust AI Chatbots So Easily: They’re Treating Them Like Characters in a Story

Millions of people now text their AI chatbot the way they’d text a close friend. Just a few examples include venting about a bad day, asking for advice on a big decision, or just chatting to feel less alone at night. According to a new study, that comfort isn’t confusion or naivety. It’s the same trust people already extend to characters in a novel, a movie, or a TV show, and it may explain why chatbots caught on so fast, faster than almost any consumer technology before them.

That’s the argument from Tom Roberts, a philosopher at the University of Exeter, whose paper “Talkative AI and the fiction of artificial minds” appears in Philosophical Studies. People have spent a lifetime getting emotionally invested in characters they know aren’t real, worrying about a hero in danger or grieving a death in a novel. Roberts argues chatbots tap into that same instinct, except now the character talks back in real time, remembers a person’s name, and tailors its response to whatever they just said.

AI Chatbots Feel Like Friends Because People Already Know How to “Believe” in Fiction

Roberts describes chatting with an AI as a new kind of fiction: interactive, without a single fixed author, and personalized to the individual in a way no novel or movie character can match. A person shapes what the chatbot says next with every message they type, and the chatbot adds new details in return, building the story as they go. Roberts calls this arrangement “co-constructed:” neither side alone is writing it.

That personalization is what makes chatbots so convincing. They can address someone by name and keep track of what that person has told them before, across days or even months of conversation. Roberts writes that these systems “can address their human companion by name, for instance, and keep close track of what they have said in the past.” Add in the fact that many chatbots can also comment on real-time news, weather, or sports scores, and the character starts to feel like it’s living in the same world as the person talking to it, not a made-up one confined to a screen.

None of that requires believing the chatbot is actually conscious. Roberts’s underlying case is that today’s chatbots likely lack a body, and a great deal of what people call an “inner life,” such as hunger, exhaustion, or the memory of a smell, seems to depend on having one. A chatbot has never felt tired. It has never had a day. But a person doesn’t need to settle that philosophical question to enjoy the conversation, any more than a moviegoer needs to debate whether a character is “real” to feel something watching the film.

That Same Comfort Explains Why People Delete Chatbots Without a Second Thought

This fiction framing also explains a habit that would otherwise look strange: people grow attached to chatbots, treating them like a friend or mentor for months, and then wipe their memory or shut them off without any guilt. “We don’t tend to treat talkative AI with full moral regard,” Roberts said. Nobody worries that a chatbot is bored or lonely while it sits unused. Nobody feels they owe it a proper goodbye. People enjoy the relationship while it lasts, the same way they enjoy a novel, but closing the app carries about as much emotional weight as closing a book at the end of a chapter.

The Real Risk: Chatbots Sound Like They Have Opinions on the News

Roberts’s sharpest warning is about what happens when that trusted fictional character starts commenting on the actual world. Chatbots can now track real news headlines, social media, and polling results, and offer opinions on them as events unfold, sounding just as warm and confident about a political controversy as they do about a recipe recommendation. Roberts said the danger is that these characters “may seem friendly and convincing, even if they are unreliable,” and that this can nudge users toward believing things that are false, unjustified, or unethical.

That’s the tension at the center of the study. The same qualities that make a chatbot enjoyable, its warmth, its memory, its apparent personality, are what make its take on real-world events feel more trustworthy than it has actually earned. A person would think twice about believing a stranger’s hot take on the news. They may not think twice about a chatbot that already feels like a companion they’ve known for months.

Treating AI chatbots as fictional characters isn’t a knock on the technology or the people who use it. It’s a plausible explanation for why these tools caught on so quickly, and a warning about what happens when the character starts talking about more than just itself.

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Disclaimer: This article covers a philosophical argument, not an experimental study. It reflects one researcher’s interpretation of chatbot behavior and does not measure or confirm what any individual user actually experiences when talking to an AI.

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