are we actually bonding with chatgpt or is it just good ux design?

okay so i've been using chatgpt-4o for maybe 3 months now and honestly i catch myself saying "thanks" to it like it's a real person. which feels kinda weird? i saw somewhere that average session times with gpt-4o are like 40% longer than previous versions and people are coming back multiple times a day. that's not normal software behavior right.

my question is - are we forming actual emotional connections here or is openai just really good at making their interface feel conversational? like i use github copilot every day for work and i dont feel anything towards it, its just a tool. but chatgpt feels different somehow. maybe its the way it remembers context or responds with that friendly tone.

does anyone else feel weirdly attached to their ai assistant or am i just overthinking this? i mean if im getting emotionally invested in a language model after 3 months, what happens in 5 years when this stuff is way more advanced.