It's sad but is it really "cringe"? Can the people have nothing? Why can't we have a chat bot to bs with? Many of us are lonely, miserable but also not really into making friends irl.

It shouldn't be so much of an ask to at least give people language models to chat with.

What you're asking for feels akin to feeding a hungry person chocolate cake and nothing else. Yeah maybe it feels nice, but if you just keep eating chocolate cake, obviously bad shit happens. Something else needs to be fixed, but just (I don't want to even call it band-aiding because it's more akin to doing drugs IMO) coping with a chatbot only really digs the hole deeper.

Make sure they get local models to run offline. That they rely on a virtual friend in the cloud, beyond their control and that can disappear or change personality in an instant makes this even more sad. That would also allow the chats to be truly anonymous and avoid companies abusing data collected by spying on what those people are telling their "friends".