It's a logical evolution of how emotional labor is used in the business world. We pay service and hospitality workers not only to literally do what their job de

It's a logical evolution of how emotional labor is used in the business world. We pay service and hospitality workers not only to literally do what their job description says but also to be nice to people, keep them engaged and create parasocial (or at least one-sided) relationships that make customers come back and spend more money. Live streamers have long deployed similar strategies with the only difference being they profit off of it themselves rather than being paid through an employer (although many employee moderators, editors and even people to manage their social media accounts so they at best only have to engage with a filtered subset of messages directly if at all). "The whole thing" in this case isn't just AI. It's "brands".