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Manu asks "how much is a friendship worth?"

With AI being the current tool du jour he wonders, when we interact with people across the globe primarily through text, what is to stop someone being replaced by a chat bot that can replicate someone's written style:

"It's only a matter of time before someone creates a virtual friend, some sort of Tamagotchi on steroids. Something you can always interact with, that is never asleep, and that is always there for you. Would you pay for something like that? And how much? How much is a friendship worth?"

I instantly thought back to Samantha, the intelligent OS, in Her, or, more recently, Joi in Bladerunner 2049.

Both AIs are mass-produced consumer products but learn (or give the impression of learning) emotion. Both claim for the capacity to love. The problem is, however, do the AIs actually learn emotions or are they, even then, just reacting to programming by showing Theodore and K what they want, or expect, to see?

With sufficiently advanced programming, could the AI itself be fooled into thinking it was experiencing emotion or love?

Is the belief of self-sentience enough to demonstrate it?

Chat bots learn by synthesising data, pattern recognition and copycatting – we go through similar processes as children. At what point does this 'processing' cross the line? When does Pinocchio become a real boy?