Memory is feeble, but I remember it being a scare. People were genuinely worried about it; mostly because it was a real thing that potentially threatened them.

This doesn't seem like a scare. If GPT and the like start outputting increasingly nonsensical outputs (which, a lot of the time, that is the case already) due to tainted inputs, oh well?

Quicksand is also a real and dangerous thing, but the media is not always proportionate in reporting the risks.

I didn’t mean to imply it wasn’t a real thing. (I’m not a native English speaker so I’m probably missing a nuance of “scare” beyond what appears to be its literal meaning of the general public being afraid.)

"scare" in English is often used to describe a public over-reaction to a perceived threat. In the US we had the "red scare" that was an over reaction to communists in the US.

A similar concept is the "satanic panic", the idea that all our children were being abducted by satanic cults.