This phenomenon is so widespread and I can't see it as anything other than serious AI psychosis.

I think people want to feel useful and helpful in general, and now a lot of people are getting this feeling by using AI to answer questions. And it's like you said they get so mad when you point out that their AI screenshot is wrong or, even more obviously, that the person who asked could also just read the google gemini blurb. They get mad because you're invalidating their feeling of being helpful.

Last year someone went missing on the water in my area. There was a lot of talk on facebook during the search, and a coordinated facebook group. And every post would have people posting their chats with ChatGPT, or saying they used AI to analyze the weather and currents on the day he went missing to figure out he probably landed on this or that shore (he didn't). These posts are equivalent to the mediums and psychics who also come in with these unhelpful advice posts.

I think fundamentally it's the same as how AI is giving some people an extremely strong feeling of being an expert, and how their psyche seems to lash out to protect that feeling when it's threatened.

Another facebook anecdote, I recently saw someone post in a local genealogy and history group some pure AI slop infographics. When people called him out he said that it's AI but he carefully vets all the information and that they need to stop being luddites or they'll be stuck in the past blah blah devolving into calling them liberals and the like. But his infographics were all incredibly obviously wrong, to anyone who had ever seen a map it's obvious that the coastlines were incredibly wrong, and the city weren't in the correct locations at all. So what can you even do with someone like that? They're just going to retreat into the safety of the chatbot to continue their "research".