I would like to see more granular numbers for how long people spend talking with chat bots, because that's a distinct possibility! I've seen numbers like "x thousand hours of conversation", but my impression is that it's tens of thousands of people messing around with it for 5-10 minutes rather than anyone (or no more than a few outliers) spending any significant amount of time with it.
As for the reddit irc bot, that's a genuinely cool and useful project, but that's querying a curated dataset rather than having a coherent conversation or identity, so I think the intentions are fairly different. On the other hand, if you had a bot that only queried the comments made by a longtime user, you could get a pretty life-like effect!
As for the reddit irc bot, that's a genuinely cool and useful project, but that's querying a curated dataset rather than having a coherent conversation or identity, so I think the intentions are fairly different. On the other hand, if you had a bot that only queried the comments made by a longtime user, you could get a pretty life-like effect!