CI. Conversational interface. That's the difference. Simply a way to interact with a computer through the same mechanisms that you would use to interact with a person, through that computer's calculating a probable human reaction to a stimulus, after looking at millions of them and counting the likelihood of all possible reactions.
The real problem is pretending like there's any thought there at all. It's not programming because it knows how a computer works, it's programming because it can calculate what a person could likely write - which is why it writes source code rather than machine language. The value comes from the fact that it can chain a bunch of these reactions together, and react to things that don't originate from a human - if set to do so by a human, and they are things that a human could also predictably react to.
I'm not 100% sure you should be able to separate it from spam detection, though. It's learning from reading emails, and later whether that email is later marked as spam or saved from the spam pile. The critical part for me is whether that information is just going to be used to detect spam, or whether it's going to be used for something else.
If you're telling me you're not going to offer me spam detection, unless I not only agree to train your spam classifier, but some other model(s) too, just say that. It makes it clear that you're taking ownership of my data as payment.
As for children being able to sell their data as payment for the use of a search engine, the government pretends to be concerned about that - why doesn't it act here?
