I was there when the world wide web was still very young. I'm a bit too young to know Usenet as anything other than a place to download pirated stuff (warez back in the day), but old enough that I played some MUDs over Telnet.

I'm honestly apathetic about AI and ignore it for the most part. I use it locally on my Immich server to allow me to search my photos by keyword but that's about it. As you say, it's mostly a minor annoyance telling me half truths with complete confidence in my search results. I really don't consider it all that different from the chatbots we had in the 00s for the most part. It used to be a game we played with our friends to see how long they would talk to the chatbot before realising it was a bot. Modern AI is just a bit better at passing the turing test and sometimes has some useful information. There just really isn't a lot that I want from an AI in general, aside from some questionable image recognition. If I'm feeling lonely I'll text a friend, pop down to the pub, or even just chat on a message board for a while. Talking to a bot honestly doesn't even occur to me.