I'm continually amazed at how much faith people have in them. I guess since they can sound like people and output really authoritative and confident text it just overrides any skepticism subconsciously?

Much as I like them, I do frequently remind myself of two things:

1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans

2) https://archive.org/details/nextgen-issue-26 as an example of how in the 90s we has rapid cycles of a new tech (3d graphics) astounding us with how realistic each new generation was compared to the previous one, and forgetting with each new (game engine) how we'd said the same and felt the same about (graphics) we now regarded as pathetic.

So yes, they do sound "authoritative and confident text it just overrides any skepticism subconsciously", but you shouldn't be amazed, we've always been like this.

The advertising campaign is incredible.

Yes, just as with politicians. And LLMs have been thoroughly tuned to appear that

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

It's mind boggling how much people claim to like LLMs when you would never design any other piece of software to operate like LLMs do. Designing a system that interact with the user through natural text creates an awful experience. It slows down every interaction as you dig through all the prose to get to the key information. It turns every computer interaction into a school math word problem.