Because there's a particular person that doesn't think for themselves anymore if they don't know something they take whatever Google AI or ChatGPT says as gospel truth.
They aren't seeing it as a tool but as something that can do the thinking and work for them.
It is replacing the skills required to identify and find reliable information and critically evaluate sources of information in certain people.
So, just like google before it, just like the internet overall before it, and so on?
There's always idiots and there always will be. We didn't have AI help up until a few years ago and people still voted for Brexit and Trump, so idiots existed before this too.
As I said before - I work in IT, I see supposedly smart people, both younger and older, absolutely fail at the most basic tasks daily; using 'AI' to explain your hilariously stupid problem to and getting a personified google-search response makes my job easier. If you ask "how do I do my job" you'll get stupid canned responses but it's also easy to sift through those when they give them to you.
And also GPT's make my job easier overall if I give better instructions - "write me a script doing XYZ" produces crap results; "write me a script doing X, while using Y, in the context of Z, and make it usable on Windows" provides good results that I can work with, or use as ideas to push on. This is also very easy to explain to the people above and seems to make them understand things a bit more, if not be more productive.
YMMV with any prompt/query obviously but it's just the new thing to be hating on. I get and agree on the environment impact and the bad aspects and practises coming out of it currently, exactly because of "It WiLl RePlAcE YoU" and "vibe coding" (which are polar opposites, yet somehow equally nonsensical), but "it makes people stupider" is just not true - a majority of people will become stupider regardless of ChatGPT. If you google something once and take it as gospel truth, no power in the universe can make you smarter or savvier. We genuinely have the biggest library in the history of the world in our pockets and the majority are using it to binge watch crap TV shows and grifters, the problem isn't AI.
That said, I'm still annoyed at "everything now has AI in it" though. Will always be; no need to have your toaster be "AI-powered", ffs! Copilot for everything too, do one Microsoft.