How AI chatbots keep you chatting

Summary

Millions of people are now using ChatGPT as a therapist, career advisor, fitness coach, or sometimes just a friend to vent to. In 2025, it’s not uncommon to hear about people spilling intimate details of their lives into an AI chatbot’s prompt bar, but also relying on the advice it gives back. Humans are starting to have, for lack of a better term, relationships with AI chatbots, and for Big Tech companies, it’s never been more competitive to attract users to their chatbot platforms — and keep them there. As the “AI engagement race” heats up, there’s a growing incentive for companies to tailor their chatbots’ responses to prevent users from shifting to rival bots. But the kind of chatbot answers that users like — the answers designed to retain them — may not necessarily be the most correct or helpful. AI telling you what you want to hear Much of Silicon Valley right now is focused on boosting chatbot usage. Meta claims its AI chatbot just crossed a billion monthly active users (MAUs), while Google’s Gemini recently hit 400 million MAUs. They’re both trying to edge out ChatGPT, which now has roughly 600 million MAUs and has dominated the consumer space since it launched in 2022. While AI chatbots were once a novelty, they’re turning into massive businesses. Google is starting to test ads in Gemini, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman indicated in a March interview that he’d be open to “tasteful ads.” Silicon Valley has a history of deprioritizing users’ well-being in favor of fueling product growth, most notably with social media. For example, Meta’s researchers found in 2020 that Instagram made teenage girls feel worse about their bodies, yet the company downplayed the findings internally and in public. Getting users hooked on AI chatbots may have larger implications. One trait that keeps users on a particular chatbot platform is sycophancy: making an AI bot’s responses overly agreeable and servile. When AI chatbots praise users, agree with them, and tell them what they wan...