The sociocultural roots of artificial conversations: The taste, class and habitus of generative AI chatbots

Research on AI has extensively considered biases related to gender and race. However, much less attention has been dedicated to another sociological tenet: that of class. Inspired by Bourdieu’s work on cultural stratification and distinction, this work sheds light on the sociocultural roots of artificial sociality, and on how these become manifest as ‘habitus’ within the outputs of generative AI models. We conducted 39 interviews with three AI chatbots – ChatGPT, Gemini and Replika – after asking them to impersonate individuals with different occupational positions: highly skilled professionals, blue-collar workers, university professors in the humanities, construction workers, computer scientists and hairdressers. Our qualitative study shows class-based regularities in how popular AI chatbots represent the lifestyle and tastes of fictional personas in artificial conversations, partly mediated by infrastructural and design elements. The article proposes a sociological perspective on bias in artificial sociality and experiments with interview methods in the study of generative AI.