They tick all the boxes: oblique meaning, a semiotic field, the illusion of hidden knowledge, and a ritual interface. The only reason we don't call it divination is that it's skinned in dark mode UX instead of stars and moons.

Barthes reminds us that all meaning is in the eye of the reader; words have no essence, only interpretation. When we forget that, we get nonsense like "the chatbot told him he was the messiah," as though language could be blamed for the projection.

What we're seeing isn't new, just unfamiliar. We used to read bones and cards. Now we read tokens. They look like language, so we treat them like arguments. But they're just as oracular, complex, probabilistic signals we transmute into insight.

We've unleashed a new form of divination on a culture that doesn't know it's practicing one. That's why everything feels uncanny. And it's only going to get stranger, until we learn to name the thing we're actually doing. Which is a shame, because once we name it, once we see it for what it is, it won't be half as fun.

People are jumping to conclusions a bit fast over here, yes technically it's possible but this kind of behavior would be relatively easy to spot because the app would have to make direct connections to the website it wants to scrap.

Your calculator app for instance connecting to CNN.com ...

iOS have app privacy report where one can check what connections are made by app, how often, last one, etc.

Android by Google doesn't have such a useful feature of course, but you can run third party firewall like pcapdroid, which I recommend highly.

Macos (little snitch).

Windows (fort firewall).

Not everyone run these app obviously, only the most nerdy like myself but we're also the kind of people who would report on app using our device to make, what is in fact, a zombie or bot network.

I'm not saying it's necessarily false but imo it remains a theory until proven otherwise.

[1] https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths