The Age of Chat

Language can contain an entire world, revealing its speakers’ history, values, or pathologies. It can also be obfuscating, diversionary, slippery. Chattiness, with its personality-driven appeals to familiarity, can conceal or elide false promises, banality, emptiness, controversy, and the context of its own existence

Transactional conversation—speaking, and being spoken to, like a bot—can be efficient, maybe even nice, depending on the context and on your disposition. But it can also feel condescending, flattening, manipulative, and generic—like being treated as an N.P.C.

Chat, they noted, can be cozy, intimate, casual, revelatory, expansive; it also has an emotional undercurrent. “Chat’s immediacy emphasizes response, reminding us that we do not simply create and express ourselves in writing, but create and express our relationships,” the editors argued

High-quality inputs are rewarded with high-quality outputs; the software is a kind of mirror. What’s happening is data exchange between user and bot—but it is also a mutual manipulation, a flywheel, an ouroboros.

Chat” evokes what search engines and databases cannot: a sense of personal involvement. It implicates one’s selfhood, which helps cultivate certain behaviors