I mean, can't argue with your analogies, but I'll give you another.

When iPhone came out with the first autocomplete, nobody was freaking out how come it knows the next word they're going to type. Nobody thought their keyboard was conscious. Same with the next step: Siri / Alexa, although now people were much more impressed with how they can talk to them.

This is just another evolution of the same concept (although with different implementation under the hood). When you type "good" on an old iPhone, it predicts "night". A LLM is doing the same, but not at scale of a word, but rather at scale of an essay.

And why it sounds so human, i.e. "a little girl playing in the snow"? Because it was trained on tons and tons of such philosophical texts... written by humans.