Original author here - this is a sister essay to an earlier Economist piece on LLMs co-authored with Cosma Shalizi, and there is a non-paywalled extended remix here - https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/shoggoths-amongst-us . Anything intelligent should be attributed to Cosma.

Thanks for the reply. I know nothing specifically about LLM's, but I've a slight problem with LLM's being called AI. I made a meme about that yesterday, which can be found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38621219 and here https://www.heyhomepage.com/?module=timeline&post=74