It's not you. These people aren't mentally well. They can't differentiate between a real person and an LLM. Probably contributes to why they're having woman problems too.

My guess would be the same phenomenon that existed with ELIZA. People want to be heard, especially lonely people, and LLMs are pretty good at that, asking questions and acting supportive, by design.

This whole situation reminds me of that fact that some people hire escorts to just have someone to talk to.

People care about being heard, not listened too. It's one-sided. I'm guessing they just like that the thing responded, and may not even bother reading carefully what it said. Like a friend who says supportive murmurings as you prattle on about whatever, "Really?", "Umm-hmm", "Oh, I know what you mean!", "Right, exactly", and, "It's nice to talk to someone I get along with."

People are very good at humanizing animals and objects. If it talks or has a face, it's subconsciously seen as a person.

Buildings are great listeners though.

Probably similar to anyone having a conversation where they ignore the “red flags” of a potential partner. Someone drinking too much, an offhand remark about bad debt, stuff like that. Except now you ignore the response that might be a non sequitur, repetitive, or just not make sense.

It's the same thing as prayer.

Placebo works for simple people.

I think that this could be a reaction, human brain is meant to at least consider every human like words

Ai is based on humans, so when you're really out of luck or desperate, this is in my opinion really hard not to fall into the trap

People watch some movies repeatedly. Isn't that similar?

you can feel seen by a picture (webcomic) even though the picture has no eyes.