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GPT stuff aside, this:
is something that I always assumed was designed to keep the customer engaged. Even clearly human chat support agents do this. Every 3 minutes they'll write something like "Thank you for your patience, we're still looking into your request."
Same reason corporate phone lines have hold music that gets interrupted every fifteen seconds with a human voice ("is it someone finally answering my call??") that says "Your call is very important to us. Please hold while we connect you to the next available representative."
It strings you along and manages to keep you on the line or chat way longer than you would if you weren't getting a steady but meaningless drip of feedback. It's dehumanizing and humiliating and encapsulates the ugly, cloying impersonality of modern life in a way I can't clearly describe.
Ah, yes, I do hate that far more in voice calls precisely for the same reason you outline. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's humiliating, but I agree it's dehumanizing. Thankfully, most companies seem to now implement a callback feature. For those that don't, ironically a different dehumanizing tech introduced with the latest Google Pixel phones allows its AI to "hold for you". While I haven't tested this out yet, it's supposed to sit and wait for both the music and the "your call is very important to us" interruptions to end until a live voice renders on the other end to notify you, probably through a ringtone playing. I admit that was one of the selling points for me personally given how painful the organic waiting experience is.
But worse yet was some other customer service calls where the wait was occupied not just by music, inane appreciative insertions, but literally ads! I believe PayPal did that at one point, with an annoying voice saying things like "did you KNOW that with PayPal, you can blah blah blah?!?!" Now that was humiliating.
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