I'm not trying to blame companies, nor am I trying to say we abandon personal responsibility. I just think that we need to look at each specific case and see what proportion of responsibility each has in influencing the other. Companies are often more powerful than individual people so there's asymmetry there, which is ripe for abuse. I don't buy the argument that companies should never be held liable.
Those are all edge cases, not serious examples of product lawsuits. Courts throw out those frivolous lawsuits. Fringe abuses don't negate corporate responsibility.
I do think that arguing that anything is virtue signaling is lazy, a conversation stopper. It's dismissive rather than engaging in the substance/content/logic. Going along with your fire/burning examples, if a building catches fire and someone installs sprinklers, you wouldn’t say they’re virtue signaling. You’d say they’re responding to risk. Same with bringing on a psychiatrist when they find that AI is involved in causing/worsening psychosis or murders or suicides.
Coding engineers fixing everything behind the scenes is unlikely. There's too many profit incentives for the company to get people addicted, hooked, engaged. The incentives aren't aligned with public interest. Engineers also aren't experts in mental health and human behavior. Bringing on a psychiatrist could end up being more performative rather than integrating our insight as psychiatrists into developing these tools, but I hope that's not the goal.
What we get out of this discussion, of course, depends on our political persuasion. Politics begins when reasonable people can disagree on a given subject. My intention isn't to attack you but rather to have a polite discussion.