I think most people just assume it's magic, and are too awestruck by the hype to think critically.
Financially this feels similar to Uber's business plan in the 2010s; undercut the market with unsound pricing propped up by venture capital (PE was literally subsidising taxi fares; they admitted this and their intention to readjust, but no one seemed to care) then stop manipulating the market and allow fares to even out at (gasp) what it cost to get a cab before Uber.
The difference here is that the LLM market is human productivity; enormous subsidies are afforded to Anthropic, OpenAI etc. in the form of VC or compute credit, but eventually those debts will be called in, the free-to-use aspect will vanish because it's simply not profitable, and we'll be left with several premium products that only a few people will actually pay for, and even then that may not be enough to cover their costs. That's when the bubble will burst.
Anyone calling anything an anti-pattern without evidence always sounds to me like 'I don't like how you do this, but I need to find a more cerebral way of describing that so I don't sound like a child.'
I feel like you're giving certain entities too much credit there. Yes text is generated to do _something_, but it may not be to communicate in good-faith; it could be keyword-dense gibberish designed to attract unsuspecting search engine users for click revenue, or generate political misinformation disseminated to a network of independent-looking "news" websites, or pump certain areas with so much noise and nonsense information that those spaces cannot sustain any kind of meaningful human conversation.
The issue with generative 'AI' isn't that they generate text, it's that they can (and are) used to generate high-volume low-cost nonsense at a scale no human could ever achieve without them.
> Life’s too short to go through it hating others
Only when they don't deserve it. I have my doubts about Google, but I've no love for OpenAI.
> Plagiarism has a particular definition ... no-one is required to append a statement crediting every text he has ever read
Of course they aren't, because we rightly treat humans learning to communicate differently from training computer code to predict words in a sentence and pass it off as natural language with intent behind it. Musicians usually pay royalties to those whose songs they sample, but authors don't pay royalties to other authors whose work inspired them to construct their own stories maybe using similar concepts. There's a line there somewhere; falsely equating plagiarism and inspiration (or natural language learning in humans) misses the point.
Like a product I wouldn't touch with a bargepole.