Smoking had a huge campaign to (a) encourage people to buy the product, (b) lie about the risks, including bribing politicians and medical professionals, and (c) the product is inherently addictive.

That's why people are drawing parallels with AI chatbots.

Edit: as with cars, it's fair to argue that the usefulness of the technology outweighs the dangers, but that requires two things: a willingness to continuously improve safety (q.v. Unsafe at Any Speed), and - this is absolutely crucial - not allowing people to profit from lying about the risks. There used to be all sorts of nonsense about "actually seatbelts make cars more dangerous", which was smoking-level propaganda by car companies which didn't want to adopt safety measures.