This is a really interesting, thoughtful comment (and exactly why I love lemmy).

I don't know if it's just my lack of imagination, but I find your description of AI pet/companion as an art/media object much more plausible and interesting rather than when people discuss their possible sentience. It really doesn't seem to many steps from Spotify's discovery weekly playlist or Google Assistant reading all my emails, when combined with LLM capacity to plausibly bullshit, to having a 'virtual friend' who texts me jokes, questions and what not.

Especially since we've both normalised interacting with humans in entirely digital ways & created a massive corpus of how humans interact via social media archives. Why do I want a calendar app pinging me a notification when I could have a virtual companion message me "I hope your haircut goes well this afternoon, looking forward to seeing your new look!" or "don't fucking forget your appointment again you dumbass" depending on what companion I purchased.

Given many people's preference to "get everything in one place", it seems likely that instead of newsletters, comedy subs or travel updates, we'll just have different imaginary friends sending us the stuff we need/want to know, mixed in with our actual friends. Some of whom might as well be virtual since we never see them in the flesh.