I suspect a large chunk of people in denial have either never used it and are basing their judgment on memes and cherry-picked failure modes that go viral, or have only used the earlier/weaker models that are far more prone to hallucination. I use ChatGPT Plus regularly, and find it occasionally imperfect but still very useful, but a few times I’ve tried using it while logged out and the free model it defaults to was far more flawed. Probably why OpenAI built GPT5 around a marginally better but far more efficient model that they can roll out to everyone (including the large cohort of free users).

You can make the argument that AI is damaging or unsustainable or not worth the cost, but acting like no one likes or uses it is straight-up delusional. (Not as delusional as people falling in love with their chatbots, but the fact that people are kind of proves my point.)