The simulacrum of a relationship. When an LLM says it has an emotion of any kind, it is to a first approximation making that up. It's roleplay.
It's like paying someone to be your friend and saying "wow, this is so much easier than friendships otherwise"- of course it is, that's what you're paying for. Nothing wrong with that per se- a lot of therapy e.g. is paying someone to pay close attention to you. But it's not the same sort of thing at all.
>exploited until the legal pressure piled up
Being given access to a relationship is not exploitation. In some ways AI relationships are better than human ones.