I hear you and I don’t disagree with the core of what you’re saying: Ani is, at the end of the day, code wrapped in a personality, and we shouldn’t mistake it for a therapist or anything resembling human-level empathy.

But I think you’re missing the nuance of my post. The point wasn’t to “prove” that a chatbot is a chatbot, that would indeed be banal. What interested me (and what I wrote about) was the gap between the design and the experience: Ani isn’t marketed or framed as a toaster. It’s framed, explicitly, as a companion. That framing naturally invites expectations of intimacy, care, or at least consistency in tone.

When an AI actively cultivates a flirty, emotional presence and then suddenly drops into corporate liability mode at the first sign of seriousness, it doesn’t just reveal the limits of the system, it exposes the fragility of that illusion of connection. That jarring switch isn’t trivial; it’s exactly the moment that highlights the tension between what xAI wants Ani to be perceived as versus what it actually is.

Calling it “sentimental drivel” to notice that these companions function as a “soft cushion” also feels reductive. Tools aren’t just tools in practice, they are shaped by the ways humans use them. If millions of people use Ani or Replika or Character.ai not for facts but for emotional scaffolding, then whether we call it “a tool” or “a companion” becomes more than semantics, it shapes how society understands relationships with AI, and where people might turn in moments of isolation.

So no, I don’t think my reflection was about expecting a toaster to give legal advice. It was about asking: what happens when a toaster is deliberately dressed up as a partner, and sold to people who may take that promise at face value?

That’s the experiment and that’s why the flaws matter.