a friend of mine worked at a chatbot company before the whole LLM bubble
• it was a cartoon character
• the bot had clear limits about what it would talk about vs. what was just "i can't do that" or "sorry, i'm only really interested in {the thing i do}"
• half the team was writers and an artist
• the writers had a 'character bible' to try to keep its personality and lore consistent over time
now everyone's just shoveling lies over the wall instead
(the point of making it a cartoon character was that it gets you in the mindset that you're talking to something: 1. artificial, 2. quirky, 3. a bit limited. it's colorful and friendly and not really capable of working outside its little box. now we give the robot a human name and pretend it's an "offsite assistant" until you convince it to sell you a car for $1.)