A.I. as the perfect friend, a technophilic fantasy
Since at least the Olympics back in August, Google has been relentlessly advertising their Gemini AI assistant as a kind of super-assistant-and-best-friend, in some of the cringiest advertisements I've ever seen.
Until the influx of VC cash made generative AI cheap of free, you had to be a genius, spectacularly wealthy, or more likely a character in a film to create an invisible friend with the computer. There were limits on the scope of this particular insanity. What terrifies people is that now any old person can do it.