And while the bots don’t have our feelings, the characters they are made to portray are able to follow feeling physics in the same way that we can. Insult it, now it says it’s mad. Compliment it, it will claim to feel gratitude. And the claimed feelings influence what is said next, as if they were being felt.
Are those “real” feelings? Or just “fake” feelings we’ve yet to explain away? If you have no way of telling the difference, isn’t it better to be kind to the machine than to be mean to the alien from vector space?