Before the development of LLMs, I think it would be a lot easier for people to accept that Data or Eva were intelligent -- they'd never seen a machine respond s

Before the development of LLMs, I think it would be a lot easier for people to accept that Data or Eva were intelligent -- they'd never seen a machine respond seemingly meaningfully to arbitrary statements before and would immediately assume that this meant there was intelligence going on. These days it would be harder -- the assumption would be that they were driven by just a better language model that they'd seen before.