AI safety is focused on AGI but maybe it should be focused on how little “artificial intelligence” it takes to send people completely off the rails. We could barely handle social media, LLMs seem to be too much.
I have the utmost confidence that things are only going to get worse from here. The world is becoming more isolated and individualistic as time progresses.
Unlike those celebrities, you can have a conversation with it.
Which makes it the ultimate parasocial product - the other kind of Turing completeness.
Seeing human-like traits in pets or plants is a much trickier subject than seeing them in what is ultimate a machine developed entirely separately from the evolution of living organisms.
We simply don't know what its like to be a plant or a pet. We can't say they definitely have human-like traits, but we similarly can't rule it out. Some of the uncertainty is in the fact that we do share ancestors at some point, and our biology's aren't entirely distinct. The same isn't true when comparing humans and computer programs.
You can also more or less apply the same thing to rocks, too, since we're all made up of the same elements ultimately - and maybe even empty space with its virtual particles is somewhat conscious. It's just a bad argument, regardless of where you apply it, not a complex insight.
Also worth noting is that alongside the very human propensity to anthropomorphize, there's the equally human, but opposite tendency to deny animals those higher capacities we pride ourselves with. Basically a narcissistic impulse to set ourselves apart from our cousins we'd like to believe we've left completely behind. Witness the recurring surprise when we find yet another proof that things are not by far that cut-and-dry.