> People are naturally predisposed to ascribe intelligence and emotion to things they interact with.

It's not just humans either. One of the things that struck me after getting my first cat was how quick he was to assign agency to random objects. Like if I accidentally bumped a stool that startled him, he'd spend a long time glaring at the stool and regarding it with intense suspicion.

My lay person guess is that there's an evolutionary benefit to erring on the side of overestimating other parties.

Chat bots, like so many other features of modern society, trigger evolutionary reactions in interesting ways.