1. You don’t get to decide if another human’s feelings are valid or not. You only get to decide if you care. You have decided that you don’t care about lonely people’s feelings who had found a way of feeling less lonely. How do you feel about that? How would you feel if something you really cared about got broken, and you complained about how that made you sad, and random strangers on the internet then said you were a “sad fucker” for caring about it in the first place? Practice empathy and sympathy - you don’t sound smart when you do this thing you just did.

2. You’re testing the software after the update that people said made it crap, and saying you can’t believe anybody liked it before it was crap, because it’s now crap. Can you see how inept your experiment design is, now I’ve pointed it out? Had you considered it may have been better before the software was crippled, and the effect you’re seeing now, is the exact problem the article is describing?

3. A basic tenet of building a human relationship is developing empathy and finding things to agree on. This is how relationships - particularly close relationships - work. What would you expect it to do when you started lying to it, start an argument? Do you think that would be a great product decision for a product that aims to develop a friendly relationship with the users? What answer would you have preferred it to give, given the design objective is to develop a friendly relationship?

4. Have you ever been asked by somebody you were really keen on if you’d read a book or heard of a band that you’d never heard of? Did you try and look a bit cool and do a “no, but I’ve heard good things”, to try and avoid burning that connection by looking completely out of touch? Are you not even slightly impressed an AI chat bot has managed to replicate that very common aspect of human cringey behaviour? I think it’s interesting it has that very common, very human, slightly amusing behaviour.