It's a mix of trying to look blasé, of believing that a superficial knowledge of how they work is enough to dismiss them as purely mechanical, and probably genu

It's a mix of trying to look blasé, of believing that a superficial knowledge of how they work is enough to dismiss them as purely mechanical, and probably genuine fear and denial for the implications of their existence. LLMs are not just intelligent, they're general intelligences in that they're not limited to a single task (such as a chess-playing AI or a voice-recognition AI) but they're capable of any task that can be performed with text as input and output (which doesn't mean it's just text manipulation, the internals are not limited to text).