Perhaps attitudes to this new phenomenon are correlated with propensity to skepticism in general. I will cite myself as Exhibit A. I am the sort of person who

Perhaps attitudes to this new phenomenon are correlated with propensity to skepticism in general. I will cite myself as Exhibit A. I am the sort of person who takes almost nothing at face value. To me, physiotherapy, and oenology, and musicology, and bed marketing, and mineral-water benefits, and very many other such things, are all obviously pseudoscience, worthy of no more attention than horoscopes. If I saw a ghost I would assume it was a hallucination caused by something I ate. So it seems like no coincidence that I reflexively ignore the AI babble at the top of search results. After all, an LLM is a language-rehashing machine which (as we all know by now) does not understand facts. That's terribly relevant. I remember reading, a couple of years back, about some Very Serious Person (i.e. a credible voice, I believe some kind of scientist) who, after a three-hour conversation with ChatGPT, had become convinced that the thing was conscious. Rarely have I rolled my eyes so hard. It occurred to me then that skepticism must be (even) less common a mindset than I assumed.