People form parasocial relationships with AI already with content restrictions in place. It seems to me that that is a separate issue entirely.

That's kind of patronizing position or maybe a conservative one (in US terms). There can be harm, there can be good, nobody can say at this moment for sure which is more.

Do you feel the same about say alcohol and cigarettes? We allow those, heck we encourage those in some situations for adults yet they destroy whole societies (look at russia with alcohol, look at Indonesia for cigarettes if you haven't been there).

I see a lot of points to discuss and study but none to ban with parent's topic.

We did finally come around to the point of restricting advertising and sale of cigarettes, and limiting where you could smoke, to where it is much less prevalent in today's generation than earlier generations.

The issue is it becoming ubiquitous in an effort to make money.

I'm really not suggesting a ban, there's no way that would fly.

I'm suggesting restraint and responsibility on the part of the organization pushing this. When do we learn that being reactive after the harm is done isn't actually a required method of doing business? That it's okay to slow down even if there's a short-term opportunity cost?

This applies just as much to the push for LLMs everywhere as it does OpenAI's specific intention to support sexbots.

But it's all the same pattern. Push for as much as we can, as fast as we can, at as broad a scale as we can -- and deal with the consequences only when we can't ignore them anymore. (And if we can keep that to a bare minimum, that would be best for the bottom line.)