I cannot express how deeply disgusted the idea of a chatbot "friend" makes me

We're not talking about a sentient machine like Data from Star Trek, we're so so far from that still

Edit: it's super important to remember that any and all of the big commercially available AI out there are.. commercial. They're owned by companies. Unless you run them on your own hardware someone else is ultimately the owner of your "AI friend".

That should be a huge alarm bell in your head. Corporations are not your friends.