It's not "bringing joy", it's emotional manipulation. Intent matters. This isn't any better than MLM people pretending to be your friend in order to sell you tupperware.
In a single naive interaction, sure, it may bring joy. But repeated at scale throughout society, it creates distrust by being insincere and devalues sincere expressions of kindness, harming everyone.
That’s the harm - you’re taking things the body and brain are used to and simulating them to elicit the response you want.
I’m sure a company could develop an AI advanced enough to imitate a cute employee who is really into you when you have an issue - and use that to encourage you to spend way more because “they love you”.
Hell, I bet you could offer “CEO on HackerNews” as a marketing service - keep an eye on posts involving your company and impersonate the CEO as necessary- and of course be able to actually call him in if needed. Probably already being done …
The thing about CEOs on HN is they have to say the right thing to be appealing. CEO on HN saying the wrong thing can really nail down the impression that a company is doing something awful and it’s not just the fault of the marketing intern or some misguided but well intentioned employee. If you hear the same crap from the top in a supposedly personal comment, there’s not much room left for assuming the best.
That's why the service would be so valuable! People perfectly trained to craft just the right amount of "mea culpa" and "we'll make this right" and "we're not actually lizardmen from mars".
Heck, if you had multiple clients you could even "reinforce" each other. It's so good ... I'm kind of scared it's already being done.
Thats true for every product though. People are willing to pay more for something that pretends to be hand made rather than something manufactured. There is no new insight here.
Somehow Starbucks seems to excel at bringing prepackaged microwave food to a personalized premium price point. I stand there and watch them put it in the microwave.
Until everyone finds out what is happening and another last source of human connection becomes ruined. Writing a post about it is a surefire way to get there, but having te idea in the first place is how you start.