I also suspected that many chatbots depend on human workers to complete their requests. Mat Honan, the San Francisco bureau chief for BuzzFeed, was able to uncover the logistics behind M — a chatbot concierge in development by Facebook — by sending, of all things, a rental parrot to another Bay Area tech reporter. It worked; the parrot arrived. But afterward, Honan made some phone calls and discovered that M’s artificial intelligence was largely a front. M processed the question and passed it along to a human counterpart to finish the job.

Similarly, Operator, Magic and Fin all fall back on hybrid bot-human models. Seen this way, chatbots aren’t that different from hiring a worker through a service like TaskRabbit or Handy, but without ever having to acknowledge there’s another human at the other end. As the sheen of A.I. fades, you can see these chatbots for what they really are: a convenient way to hide human labor. It starts to resemble an update on a centuries-old illusion called the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing device that was said to be automated but was, in fact, powered by a person hidden inside the “machinery” itself.

Even when the services are truly automated, their functions seem secondary to Facebook’s quest for domination. Bots developed in partnership with CNN and The Wall Street Journal can deliver news headlines by Facebook Messenger; Operator and Spring let people shop from within Messenger for clothing and food. Disney built a bot based on the Muppet Miss Piggy that users can talk to if they are bored, and there’s even a version of Zork, an early, text-based video game, that works in there, too. Eventually, Facebook users will be able to use bots to check movie times, bid on eBay items, browse for hotel deals on Expedia, place an order at Burger King and check their bank balances — all without ever having to exit Messenger.

Indeed, it’s hard not to see that as the depressing point of it all: These bots will simply help Facebook and others rope users in as long as possible, like fishermen trawling the open seas with gaping nets. The current slate of chatbots on Facebook look like innovation clipped for the sake of supremacy. The company has been moving in this direction for some time now. Everything from Facebook Live, its new real-time streaming product, to Internet.org, the nonprofit it oversees that seeks to provide Internet access to the developing world, has been accused of harboring the same goal: keeping users on Facebook’s turf.

Bots, which promise to make us more godlike, are instead revealing our all-too-human shortcomings and pettiness. This was on full display when Microsoft tried to show off the prowess of its A.I. in March with a chatbot named Tay, a virtual buddy you could talk to on messaging services like GroupMe and Twitter. Almost immediately, the demonstration turned into a public-relations nightmare as online pranksters taught Tay to mimic hate speech (e.g., “Hitler was right I hate the Jews”; “I [expletive] hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell”). Tay’s rants weren’t the intended work of Microsoft, obviously, but the meltdown revealed an uncomfortable truth: A bot, like any other piece of software, is only as good as its makers’ imagination. Technologies embody the values — and the biases and prejudices — of the society that incubates them, and if we can’t imagine the future we want, then neither can our creations.