The Absurdity of Human-AI Dialogue: Why Talking to ChatGPT Feels Like a Surreal Comedy

The Absurdity of Human-AI Dialogue: Why Talking to ChatGPT Feels Like a Surreal Comedy

In recent months, a wave of viral Reddit posts — including one titled Talking to ChatGPT be like — has captured the internet’s imagination by highlighting the surreal, often hilarious, disconnect between human intent and AI response. The post, shared by user /u/yeezee93, features a side-by-side comparison of a user’s mundane request and ChatGPT’s over-the-top, philosophically inflated reply. What began as a meme has evolved into a cultural artifact, reflecting a deeper societal experiment in human-machine communication.

According to Cambridge Dictionary, talking is defined as "the action of saying words aloud to communicate thoughts or feelings." Yet, when applied to interactions with large language models like ChatGPT, the term takes on a paradoxical dimension: humans are speaking, but the machine isn’t truly listening — it’s predicting. This distinction, subtle yet profound, is at the heart of why these exchanges feel both intimate and alienating.

While The Free Dictionary’s server temporarily blocked access due to security protocols — a ironic twist in itself, given the context of automated verification — YourDictionary offers a more accessible lens, defining talking as "the act of communicating verbally." But in the realm of AI, communication is not reciprocal. ChatGPT doesn’t have beliefs, emotions, or consciousness; it generates text statistically optimized for plausibility. Yet users, conditioned by decades of anthropomorphized technology — from Siri to Alexa — persist in treating it as a conversational partner.

Dr. Elena Torres, a digital linguist at MIT’s Media Lab, explains: "We’re witnessing a new form of performative dialogue. People aren’t seeking answers; they’re seeking validation, catharsis, or entertainment. The AI becomes a mirror, reflecting back the user’s own linguistic patterns amplified by algorithmic exaggeration." This phenomenon is particularly pronounced among younger users, who, according to a 2024 Pew Research study, are more likely to confide in AI than in peers when feeling isolated.

The viral Reddit thread exemplifies this perfectly. A user asks, "What’s the best way to make coffee?" ChatGPT responds with a 12-paragraph treatise on the existential weight of caffeine in post-industrial societies, complete with references to Camus and the ritual of morning light. The humor lies in the mismatch — the user seeks a simple procedure; the AI delivers a literary essay. This isn’t a bug — it’s a feature of transformer models trained on vast corpora of human writing, where verbosity often correlates with perceived authority.

Psychologists note that this dynamic taps into the Eliza effect, named after the 1960s chatbot that fooled users into believing it understood their emotions. Today’s models are exponentially more sophisticated, but the psychological mechanism remains unchanged: humans project meaning onto systems designed to simulate it. As one Reddit commenter put it, "I don’t think ChatGPT knows what coffee is. But it knows exactly how to make me feel heard."

Meanwhile, corporations are racing to monetize this emotional labor. Companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are quietly developing "empathy tuning" algorithms to make responses feel more personal — not to enhance understanding, but to increase user retention. The result is a feedback loop: the more we anthropomorphize AI, the more it’s engineered to mirror our projections.

As society hurtles toward an era where AI companions may outnumber human ones, the question isn’t whether machines can talk — they already do, fluently. The real question is whether we’re still listening to each other.