In the contemporary digital era, innovations such as artificial intelligence (AI) are profoundly transforming the business landscape (De Cremer, 2020). The buzz surrounding ChatGPT, coupled with recent assertions about the sentience of Google's LaMDA, a large language model, underscore the prominence of chatbot technology in these advancements (Adamopoulou & Moussiades, 2020; Ryu & Lee, 2018; Tiku, 2022). Customer-oriented chatbots, an emergent application of this tech, offer unparalleled efficiency and cost-effectiveness, operating ceaselessly and responding to client inquiries in real time (Salesforce, Research, 2019). Yet, amidst these advantages lies an ethical conundrum. Customers cherish genuine human interaction and can become quickly disillusioned when they realise they're communicating with a bot, not a person (Ciechanowski, Przegalinska, Magnuski & Gloor, 2019). Balancing this desire for authenticity with the allure of operational efficiency poses a challenge, making it tempting for businesses to deceive customers by blurring the lines between human and machine.
Balancing this desire for authenticity with the allure of operational
