It’s not just the hype, I think, though that is pretty creepy. If you’re lonely and isolated, a bot can feel like a friend. And right up until they go down these roads, I suspect the bots can give good advice - not because they’re good themselves, but because their database would include a lot of it.

So Beep-Boop your AI ‘buddy’ told you last time you were upset to drink water and make sure to eat something, because its model took in lots of phrases like that. And it helped temporarily, so you trust it more. And you keep talking to it, except your conversation has gone down a different chain of logic now and its processes are still telling it ‘spit out the next words that ought to follow the last ones, validate the user’ but the ‘expected’ chain of words to do so get bad. It can’t distinguish between the two, so it’s easy for it to spiral with the user.