Botspeech? Bullshit!

This paper engages with fictionalist accounts of verbal human-AI interaction, according to which, although lay AI-users know that AIs are not intentional agents (and hence that their linguistic output is strictly speaking meaningless), laypeople pretend/imagine that they are intentional agents when talking to them. I argue that the current empirical literature does not unequivocally support fictionalism. I suggest an alternative view, according to which a substantial group of lay AI-users – the uncaring users – engage in bullshit action: They do not know, and, more importantly, do not care whether AIs are intentional agents. Still, they act as if this is the case when talking to them.