There’s plenty of free ways to use LLMs, including having the models run locally on your computer instead of an online service, which vary greatly in quality and privacy. There’s some limited free ones too, but imo they’re all shit and extremely stupid, in the literal sense - you get even better results with a small model on your computer. They can be fun, especially if they work well, but the magic kinda goes away when you understand more how they actually work, which also makes all the little “mistakes” of them very obvious and that kind of kills the immersion and with that the fun of it.

A good chat can indeed feel pretty good if you’re lonely, but you kinda have to understand that they are not real, and that goes not just for potentially bad chats, but even for the good ones. An LLM is not a replacement for real people, nothing an LLM outputs is real. And yes, if you have issues with addictions, then you may want to keep your distance. I remember how people got addicted to regular chat rooms back in the early days of the world wide web, now imagine those people with a machine that can roleplay any scenario you want to play with it. If you don’t know your limits then that can be very bad indeed, even outside of taking them too seriously.

I can generally only advice to just not take them seriously. They’re tools for entertainment, toys. Nothing more, nothing less.