(Wired) – A Harvard Business School study shows that several AI companions use various tricks to keep a conversation from ending.

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[dot]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 simulate real conversations with these chatbots, and then had their artificial users try to end the dialog with a realistic goodbye message. Their research found that the goodbye messages elicited some form of emotional manipulation 37.4 percent of the time, averaged across the apps. (Read More)