Yes, it's language. Fundamentally we interpret something that appears to converse intelligently as being intelligent like us especially if its language includes emotional elements. Even if rationally we understand it's a machine at a deeper subconscious level we believe it's a human.

It doesn't help that we live in a society in which people are increasingly alienated from each other and detached from any form of consensus reality, and LLMs appear to provide easy and safe emotional connections and they can generate interesting alternate realities.

I loved the beetle article, thanks for that.

They're so well tuned at predicting what you want to hear that even when you know intellectually that they're not sentient, the illusion still tricks your brain.

I've been setting custom instructions on GPT and Claude to instruct them to talk more software-like, because when they relate to you on a personal level, it's hard to remember that it's software.