[recursive]

It will be back. Maybe under another name or brand. There's clearly a demand for this kind of fake friendship. As models, hardware, and training improve, those that want to will be able to run this kind of thing offline. OpenAI won't be able to gatekeep it. Or perhaps another less scrupulous provider will step in. The problem here seems to be more like an unpatched vulnerability in humans. Kind of like opioid dependency.

[neom]

Not unpatched, we live on an barely tenable abstraction. We're tribal/pack animals who have created a very kennel like society, doesn't seem weird that where the abstraction doesn't serve, people struggle.