As long as I can avoid or disable "AI", I'll continue to ignore it. Consistent, reliable, predictable, that's what I want from my computers. Boring is good.
One domain that a little OO seems to map to without too much pain is GUI libraries. The first OO-flavoured API I ever used was Sunview, the early GUI I used on Sun-3 workstations with SunOS. It was a beautiful API; I was never tempted to mess with the verbose, complex "Intrinsics-based" toolkits that followed it. It carried on with xview; that's what I'd try if I wanted to write a GUI in C today.
OOP has always felt to me like it was inspired by writing GUI APIs; Sun's Suntools -> Sunview -> xview (if I'm remembering the names right) were early-mid 1980s C, and felt beautifully OO, and very clean to write GUI programs. I enjoyed writing image analysis and manipulation in them. Never used the successor "intrinsics-based" Motif and CDE, the code was yucky. Didn't write another GUI until I did a dashboard (for automated software deployment) in TCL/Tk. But yeah, C++ never interested me for OO, C was fine.
I think of audiobooks as a very different form from books; I read lots of books, but listen to almost no audiobooks, though I've bought a few, and have listened to my favourite, Spider Robinson reading a collection of Heinlein short stories, a few times.
For me, books allow me to listen (with my mind's inner voice) to the author's voice directly; a human's dramatic performance gets between my imagination and the author.
When I want to enjoy hands- and eyes-free reading, I turn on TTS in my ebook-reading app; the mechanical, robotic voice doesn't get between me and the author. It's more like reading with my eyes.
Back before Android, I'd use flite (Festival Lite, a simple, single-file, pure-C spinoff of the Festival TTS research project) to convert a few books from txt to wav, then to ogg, and load them on an iRiver before a long drive.
I do like Librivox as a recommendation service; there's a lot of books in Project Gutenberg, but the ones that get to Librivox had one or more volunteers who thought that book worth the time and effort to read aloud.
Footnote 7's "crypto pushers rebranding as AI influencers" is something I've noticed, not as much in specific names, as the overall tone of the sales pitch.
I have a clear memory that, at the time, cellphone carriers were adamant about strictly controlling how their networks were used. If anything but voice or SMS crossed their network, they wanted to be bribed to permit it. The surprising coup was Apple getting them to admit a device with such flexibility onto their network.
Then Google finished the job; side-loading was no longer "jailbreaking", it was directly supported, and programming on the device wasn't prohibited. I'm not the customer for an iPhone, I really doubt they'd ever open up so that iPhone owners could install an open source app store (f-droid), and from that a full development environment (termux), within which you can install a bigger distro (Debian) to install e.g. Calibre for ebook-reformatting. Or git, or LaTeX, or rust, or emacs.
I'd forgotten all about that gizmo. Under the heading Steve Jobs in my memory, it got completely replaced by "the computer for the rest of them", with a GUI tuned to hide the computer, to prevent users from being tempted to use it as a way to learn to program computers.
The NeXT was competing against Sun, priced accordingly, and novel for being weird.