I'd say it's closer to emulating human documents. In most cases, The LLM itself is a name-less and ego-less clockwork Document-Maker-Bigger. It is being run ag

I'd say it's closer to emulating human documents. In most cases, The LLM itself is a name-less and ego-less clockwork Document-Maker-Bigger. It is being run against a hidden theater-play script. The "AI assistant" (of whatever brand-name) is a fictional character seeded into the script, and the human unwittingly provides lines for a "User" character to "speak". Fresh lines for the other character are parsed and "acted out" by conventional computer code. That character is "helpful and kind and patient" in much the same way way that another character named Dracula is a "devious bloodsucker". Even when form is really good, it isn't quite the same as substance. The author/character difference may seem subtle, but I believe it's important: We are not training LLMs to be people we like, we are training them to emit text describing characters and lines that we like. It also helps in understanding prompt injection and "hallucinations", which are both much closer to mandatory features than bugs.