alt Hacker NewsYou're making the same mistake here that get people into trouble.
People aren't talking to another sentient entity (though some of them fervently think so) and it isn't manipulating them. They are making faces in a metaphorical mirror that reflects not only their face, but a vast sea of other faces, drawn from a significant fraction of the digitized output of humanity. When people look in this mirror and see a manipulative trickster they're not wrong, exactly.
It's an understandable mistake that we should be very wary of.
I wouldn't dismiss the GP's point so quickly. Right now people are being trained to think of AI as something you can chat with. What stops an adversarial entity to identify users of interest and swap the chatbot on the other end with a human agent whose objective is to extract information or guide the user?