Walter Benjamin once noted that the art of narrating touched to the end, when regretting the ‘disappearing of the beauty of genre'32 that had been produced by narrators through the European literary tradition. Benjamin's profound insight into the fate of narrativity has returned to relevance in today's unprecedented technological context. With the development of artificial intelligence technology, we are becoming accustomed to the emerging phenomenon of conversational robots. Considering the growing interest in ‘chatterbots (chatbots, bots)' and their spreading popularity over diverse sectors, academic scholars like us feel more than ever forced to seriously take them into account and entered into debates on the crucial topics surrounding them. As the chatterbots mechanically mimic human language, a fundamental question can be raised: one day in the near future will they be able to replace human conversational partners? Ultimately we must ponder whether chatterbots really can use human language and how artificial language comes to the symbolic level, a distinctive feature of the former. For these problematic lines of questioning, the concept of narrative intelligence (Paul Ricoeur) can provide an interesting argument with a particular aspect constituting personal identity: ipseity and alterity. Following this hermeneutic stance, we can say that personal identity is of great importance. As for personal identity, we can distinguish two levels: identity as sameness (performance) and identity as alteration (diversité) following P. Ricoeur's theory of narrativity. Accordingly, the question of personal identity is closely aligned with the question of the self (le soi). In particular the concept of le soi should not be thought of without considering that of ipseity. The very idea of ipseity is located at the level of the self (le soi) on which all aspects of the self (myself, yourself, himself, ourselves, yourselves, and so forth) can be distributed respectively. P. Ricoeur accurately pointed out that this question of self as le soi is not the question of what, but rather of who. Not only are the ipseity and le soi rendered over the temporal dimension, but they are also involved in the ethical level, because the question of self can not be separated from the agent of an action as the ‘assignation of an agent.' Correspondingly the other humanistic perspectives like Ernst Cassirer's ‘symbolic pregnance' conception and Merleau-Ponty's ontological phenomenology can naturally join with the Ricoeurian hermeneutic perspective to further investigate how closely interconnected the bodily function and mechanism of gennerating meanings[Bedeutung]. To our knowledge, this distinctive genuinely human characteristic makes a decisive difference between robotic artificial intelligence and human narrative intelligence. Therefore no matter which forms chatbots take in the future, we can hardly imagine that they could access the symbolic level of human language.