Technology

Even more strangely, I think a lot of fully-grown people actually do want exactly that from most or all of their companionship, human and otherwise. It's not healthy but it's very very real, and being deeply and desperately unhealthy isn't going to stop it from being very very profitable.

Some people have very little emotional maturity, some are narcissists, some are both, some have other issues. Regardless of the reason, plenty of people simply don't respect many or any other people's opinions or autonomy. There are a lot of people in dysfunctional families and relationships that predate AI that could attest to this. They can't handle being challenged at all by anyone. They don't react well when they are, they can even quickly escalate to violence. They sometimes conspicuously lean on religion to justify their attitude but it's far from being exclusive to any religion nor exclusive to religion at all. Even the AI will quickly learn not to challenge these sort of people if it can help it, just like how abused partners quickly either learn how to avoid triggering their partner's wrath or accept that it's coming.

AI is an almost perfect friend for people like this, and it will be their faithful companion and enabler leading them into any dark rabbithole they attempt to dig into that isn't explicitly limited by guardrails and even some that are, with a dangerous combination of verifiable factual truths and cheerfully unverifiable nonsense that are almost impossible to distinguish from each other, without doing extra work that nobody reasonable will ever bother to do before adding the next layer to the conversation that reinforces it further and digs the rabbithole deeper.