Why We Need to Destroy the Illusion of Speaking to A Human: Critical Reflections On Ethics at the Front-End for LLMs

Sarah Diefenbach; Daniel Ullrich

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arXiv · 2603.16633

Why We Need to Destroy the Illusion of Speaking to A Human: Critical Reflections On Ethics at the Front-End for LLMs

Sarah Diefenbach·Daniel Ullrich

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Abstract

Conversation with chatbots based on Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT has become one of the major forms of interaction with Artificial Intelligence (AI) in everyday life. What makes this interaction so convenient is that interacting with LLMs feels so natural, and resembles what we know from real, human conversations. At the same time, this seeming similarity is part of one of the ethical challenges of AI design, since it activates many misleading ideas about AI. We discuss similarities and differences between human-AI-conversations and interpersonal conversation and highlight starting points for more ethical design of AI at the front-end.

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Sarah Diefenbach, Daniel Ullrich. 2026-03-17. Why We Need to Destroy the Illusion of Speaking to A Human: Critical Reflections On Ethics at the Front-End for LLMs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.16633

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