> What the hell is the point of human interaction if the "human" just forwards a chat bot's response

Forwarding an AI response (or any canned response) sends the message that they don’t want to interact with you. That could be intentional.

I think you're overthinking it. People generally want to be helpful, and do actions they think are "useful" so most likely; these people think they're actually being helpful and useful when they do things like that. Similarly to "no one thinks they're evil" I suppose.