I mean, yeah, it’s possible that it’s not as important of a factor for the hype. I’m a software engineer, and even before the advent of generative AI, we were riding on a (smaller) wave of hype for discriminative AI.

Basically, we had a project which would detect that certain audio cues happened. And it was a very real problem, that if it fucked up once every few minutes, it would cause a lot of problems.

But when you actually used it, when you’d snap your finger and half a second later the screen turned green, it was all too easy to forget these objective problems, even though it didn’t really have any anthropomorphic features.

I’m guessing, it was a combination of people being used to computers making objective decisions, so they’d be more willing to believe that they just snapped badly or something.
But probably also just general optimism, because if the fuck-ups you notice are far enough apart, then you’ll forget about them.

Alas, that project got cancelled for political reasons before anyone realized that this very real limitation is not solvable.