It does for a lot of people, yes. I've lost count of the number of encounters I've had with people online or IRL that claim chatGPT is great because it cures cancer or some other such nonsense.

I think that for the general population it does. In the sense that they read this story about AI that is being used for medicine, and then they hear criticisms about LLM cconpanies and datacenters, and they might think "well, at least it was being used for medicine"

At least that's how I see it with family members and acquaintances I know who fall for the ads for LLMs.