When a colleague was using an AI tool and it unexpectedly swore at him, his reaction caught him off guard. It wasn’t amusement or confusion — it was genuine discomfort. And that raised a question worth exploring: why do we have such strong emotional responses to AI behaviour?In this episode, Dr. Kannin Osei-Tutu and I dig into the research on how humans relate to AI systems. We cover the CASA paradigm — the finding that we automatically apply social rules to computers the same way we do to people — and what happens when the “character” we’ve built for an AI tool suddenly breaks. We discuss the uncanny valley effect in text-based AI, the paradox that making AI feel more human-like can backfire, and the flip side of the coin: automation bias, where we trust AI too much.Kannin reflects on what his experience revealed about his own assumptions, and we close with a challenge: pay attention to your emotional reactions when using AI tools this week. What patterns emerge? What character have you built?

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