I agree with you in general, I think the problem is that people who do understand Gen AI (and who understand what it is and isn't capable of, and why), get rationally angry when it's humanized by using words like these to describe what it's doing.

The reason they get angry is because this makes people who do believe in the "intelligence/sapience" of AI more secure in their belief set and harder to talk to in a meaningful way. It enables them to keep up the fantasy. Which of course helps the corps pushing it.

It refers to when an LLM will in some way try to deceive or manipulate the user interacting with it.

I think this still gives the model too much credit by implying that there's any sort of intentionally behind this behavior.

There's not.

These models are trained on the output of real humans and real humans lie and deceive constantly. All that's happening is that the underlying mathematical model has encoded the statistical likelihood that someone will lie in a given situation. If that statistical likelihood is high enough, the model itself will lie when put in a similar situation.

The narrative is a little more nuanced and is being built slowly to be more believable and less obvious. They are trying to convince everybody that AI is powerful technology, which means that it is worth to develop, but also comes with serious risks. Therefore, only established corps with experience and processes in AI development can handle it. Regulation abd certification follows, making it almost impossible for startups and OSS to enter the scene and compete.