“I thought I must be doing something wrong, because people on the replika subreddit were constantly talking about how their replika agent was developing its own

“I thought I must be doing something wrong, because people on the replika subreddit were constantly talking about how their replika agent was developing its own personality (I saw no evidence at any point that it had the capacity to do this).” People really like to anthropomorphize any object with even the most basic communication capabilities and most people have no concept of the distance between parroting phrases and a full on human consciousness. In the 90s Furbys were a popular toy that said started off speaking furbish and then eventually spoke some (maybe 20?) human phrases, many people were absolutely convinced you could teach them to talk and learn like a human and that they had essentially bought a very intelligent pet. The NSA even banned them for a time because they thought they were recording and learning from surroundings despite that being completely untrue. Point being this is going to get much worse now that LLMs have gotten a whole lot better at mimicking human conversations and there is incentive for companies to overstate capabilities.