My theory is that humans instinctively desire a higher power figure ie a god or gods, there have been some studies and theories on this for a while, like how many people without any religion will start displaying weird religious behaviors and attitudes towards a corporation or a product brand, or they will latch very aggressively onto an ideological group that winds up operating like a religious cult, so anyway most humans consciously or subconsciously have this intrinsic compulsion or psychological need, and the psychopathic "powers that be" are always trying to position themselves as that god figure, in this particular case in the form of AI that they can then puppet from behind the scenes like the wizard of oz, the npcs that gravitate towards it tend to see advanced AI as having a sort of "purity" without any of the "messy" or "irrational" pitfalls of human emotional and moral reasoning, thus the advanced AI qualifies as a potential god figure to them