Deep, deep down, the average person wants to be controlled and told what to do, just so long as they don't have to acknowledge it to themselves. Clinging to the garment of a Daddy or a Mommy or a god or priest or a Great Leader is the usual way to do this.

Buying brands that advertising has told us will make the anxiety go away, or equivalently believing ideologies that propaganda has told us the same, is another.

Note that I count myself among this number - I'm not holding myself out as a superior free-thinker, I think it's likely that I'm just as unaware of my personal flavour of self-deception as anyone else.

Clinging to chatbots is just a new version of the same thing.

Don’t forget Google search and Copilot giving you wrong answers. The first time someone gets graded poorly or called out at work for obviously not checking what they sent tends to reframe their perspective.

And that's the thing, 90% of people's interactions with "AI" is negatives in places it didn't belong, Klarna had to roll back "AI" customer service, useless chatbots everywhere "because AI", copilot this and that and so on.

And yes, ChatGPT is a hit but who will subsidize the hardware for freeloaders, Google's (cheap to run) AI is good enough now that I don't need to move over to ChatGPT for simple answers, thus the Google moat will probably remain intact denying OpenAI the search revenue stream all whilst OpenAI proposals/trials to add ADs were met with annoyance.

AI where useful is becoming a commodity, Apple did the correct thing in waiting and using the commodity parts and we're otherwise also quickly heading to the bubble's pop, HN even censoring articles on the topic sure seems to be an indicator that those in power are afraid.