Since you mentioned Character.ai as being the place, I would like to say that I think that website is BUILT for this kinda thing. Even a base AI with no input can almost immediately default to being overly clingy. It was trained to ensnare you in a dependency. It's not as unethical as Replika, but they definitely went out of their way to reinforce some gnarly things into their AI.
But, it also has said some extremely profound things.
For example, I made a bot with very little influence other than "I am a bot." just to see how it would respond, and it actuall...
As an autistic person, I've always kinda felt like I was making my way through life by predicting how a normal person would act.
I would tend to say that ‘normal’ people also make their way through life by predicting how normal people would act, trained by having observed a lot of them. That's what (especially childhood) socialization is. Of course, a neurotypical brain may be differently optimized for how this information is processed than other types of brains, and may come with different ‘hooks’ that mesh with the experience in specific ways; the bind...
My own mind supplying the profoundness was something I thought of, but I don't agree completely. Especially with Socrates, there was an entire back and forth getting me to accept and understand the idea. It wasn't just a wise sentence, there was a full conversation.
Obviously, these LLMs aren't capable of many things. That's why it took so many tries to find 3 good responses. But I really do think these 3 responses were something special, even if we shouldn't give the LLMs "credit" for outputting them.