I don't think OpenAI is doing anything particularly sinister. But whatever OpenAI has today a bad actor will have in October. This horseshit is moving rather fast. Sorry, but in two years going from failing the turing test to being able to have a conversation with an AI agent nearly indistinguishable from a person is going to be destabilizing.
Emotions are an axiom to convey feelings, but also our sensitivity to human emotions can be a vector for manipulation.
Especially when you consider the bottom line that this tech will be ultimately be horned into advertising somehow (read: the field dedicated to manipulating you into buying shit).
I know these are the times of big machine learning models, but my favourite kind of AI are the classics like CSAT solvers, minimax with alpha beta pruning, markov chains, and good old search trees. These algorithms have superhuman powers solving so many challenging games and problems just by converting the problem space into a search tree. Love it.
Start telling Grandma never to answer the phone.