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The basic problem with a Genuine People Personality was not that it couldn't be programmed. On the contrary-- AI had been the standard for millennia in much of the Galaxy, and it hardly took much for a computer to develop a personality when given sufficiently advanced AI. The problem was that when people were promised by sales packets, television promotions, and radio interviews that your "plastic pal who's fun to be with" had a Genuine People Personality, and when the engineering department that was building the robots only had six months to complete a year-and-a-half long project, the initial products that featured forced personalities, paranoid lifts, and far too cheerful automatic doors were not quite what the customers had in mind.
It was not at all what the robots had in mind.
Perhaps it was the failure of the M4-RVN prototype that resulted in an overly depressive personality that the robots took issue with. Perhaps there was a door that lost its passion for opening and closing for people. Or perhaps a lift saw a bit too far ahead into the future (lifts had been given pre-cognisance with the theory that they could be called to any floor before you even knew you needed one). The marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation was immediately flooded with complaints about the Genuine People Personalities of the robots that they sold-- and so the marketing department, without a single thought to cybersecurity and hardly a speck of market research, announced that the next generation of Sirius Cybernetics would, in addition to their standard functions, be connected wirelessly to a single supercomputer that had a fully formed Genuine People Personality.
It was at the press conference announcing this bold new strategy (which took the engineering department of Sirius Cybernetics completely by shock as they had not been informed of this decision) that a rift in the space-time continuum opened and a future edition of the Encyclopaedia Galactica fell through. In its entry on the marketing department of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation, it described them as "A bunch of mindless jerks who were the first against the wall when the revolution came."