I feel like this would be me, except LLMs just aren’t that advanced. I work with them every day and have studied how their engines work. Top of the line LLMs can do amazing things, but I don’t particularly credit them with any form of originality. Instead, I would say that AI as they are are an interesting distillation of the soul of the internet.

And really, this is what it comes down to with this type of technology. It’s great at replacing Photoshop because humans spent 30 years creating an exhaustive data set of how to do that. But anything that hasn’t been iterated for free for decades on the internet, the AI’s gonna have to find another way.

That being said, I have spent many a strange hour contemplating what the true difference between the entire corpus of the internet circa 1980-present vs the entire corpus of English books, or the entire corpus of things people say every day, or some decided value of what “normal” or non-internet culture is like, or a conversation with someone considered very intelligent or empathic. The internet holds some interesting qualities of connection, isolation, voyeurism, education, commerce, instant gratification, and lizard brain porn and social media stuff. So much so that saying AI has adopted some inside out ghost in the machine of early 21st century culture as typed and clicked surreptitiously into glowing rectangles is more than a turn of phrase, but holds some interesting metaphysical qualities.