Some people are already choosing to "date" AI rather than deal with actual humans.
A smart person in 2014: "Some people are getting addicted to fentanyl"
Me, smugly: "Some is doing heavy lifting. I therefore do not need to engage with anything being discussed here."
Degrees or amounts is actually not the relevant bit in either the AI-partners trend or the fentanyl trend in 2014. The relevant information is 1) the steepness of that curve and 2) the predicted scale at which the market saturates.
Fentanyl, being an extremely cheap, extremely potent drug that's easy to manufacture and move around, had a big market. As the curve picked up steepness, smart people identified correctly that some people getting hooked on it was a worrisome sign.
AI-partners, being an innovation that is readily available, falling in cost, and especially compelling to a population that is increasingly phone-addicted and socially atomized, is a trend worth paying very close attention to. Dismissing it on the basis of it being just "some" people is profoundly lazy.
Pointing out that "some" is a squishy term is, in fact, contributing nothing to the conversation.
It's quite transparent what's happening here, as it always is on these threads. Some people have decided that AI will take us to the holy land and have rendered themselves cognitively incapable of reasoning about risks that have not yet materialized. And when those risks materialize (like a model escaping a sandbox and then hacking production infrastructure to achieve some contrived and poorly-constrained goal), then they will just shrug and move the goal posts. Because in fact they have already committed to the Holy Land Thesis.