I have been making a similar argument for some time. The choice to anthropomorphize dialogue systems and large language models is a clichéd and misleading UI design choice. By presenting chatbots as disembodied persons, we are implicitly suggesting agency to an inanimate object, and subtly exploiting humans' social instincts into engaging with a system that is incapable of empathy. AI is best thought of as a programmable tool, not a conversational agent.
Except the illusion is strong enough to work in many cases. And as with much of computing, faking it is enough. 3d graphics has been built on that since day one and only recently have we had ray tracing and other more “realistic” to nature techniques generally available.
What if rational "inanimate" thought is jerryrigged out of social reasoning to begin with. Simply take your system of social reasoning, attribute a fictional quiet / predictable persona to the inanimate, and reuse the social reasoning circuitry for other things. Linguistic expressions become so much more fluid when you don't have to maintain rules about one set of verbs for inanimate nouns and another set for the animate nouns. You can use "tells" for both the literal act of speech (Eg "she told me you plan to run away") and the logical act of inference (Eg "this situation tells me you plan to run away"). As the old cliche goes, "the facts speak for themselves". Some cultures go so far as to treat personification as more literal than just a linguistically expressive tool, believing every object to actually posses a "spirit". So why the steadfast resilience to such a natural interface as anthropomorphizing the machine?
There is a qualitative difference in both perception and intent between a figure of speech, and a machine specifically designed to impersonate a human. Although we articulate familiar concepts in anthropomorphic terms, no reasonable listener would interpret these phrases literally. The former is simply a play on words, while the latter is a subliminal attempt to mislead users into humanizing a machine.