I keep hearing that "the average person hates AI", but their revealed preference is different. Any time they need to make anything that takes effort a lot of people immediately turn to ChatGPT.
People don't like to consume AI-made things but they sure like to use it.
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.
Or, more charitably, they don't want to be controlled but rather want guidance and wisdom in a difficult and confusing world.
That sounds like an untestable hypothesis, aka conspiracy theory.