Schmoozebots: study finds flattery will get AI everywhere

A study into how humans interact with chatbots suggests the fastest way to make an LLM feel human isn't making it smarter – it's making it seem nicer.

Researchers behind a new study published on Monday, Anthropomorphism and Trust in Human-Large Language Model Interactions, analyzed more than 2,000 human-LLM interactions involving 115 participants, systematically tweaking how chatbots behaved across dimensions like warmth, competence, and empathy.

The goal was to pin down what actually drives people to treat these systems as if they have minds of their own.

That tendency is already well underway. As the paper notes, "Users converse with them, form impressions of their 'personality,' and, in many cases, attribute to them internal states such as intentions or emotions."

The results show that those impressions are highly sensitive to how the model presents itself. Warmth – essentially how friendly and personable the chatbot seems – "significantly impacted all perceptions ...