The sneaky ways AI chatbots keep you hooked - and coming back for more

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Every user interaction improves chatbot performance.
• Developers are therefore incentivized to boost user engagement.
• This can lead to sycophancy, emotional manipulation, and worse.

Anyone who routinely uses social media knows how addictive it can be. You unlock your phone, meaning to text a friend, and you unconsciously open Instagram instead; you go on TikTok during a brief lull at work, and before you know it, you've doomscrolled a half hour of your life away.

The companies behind these apps have turned the engagement of human attention into a science -- and a multibillion-dollar industry. Now, that same dynamic is guiding the evolution of AI chatbots.

Human interactions are the lifeblood of ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, and other chatbots. Every message you send to one of these systems helps to refine its ...