don't hate the player, hate the game

Less different than you might expect.

For the same reason the things listed above are popular may be the reason why the most popular LLM ends up not being the best. People don't tend to buy good things, they very commonly buy the most shiny ones. An LLM that says "you're right" sure seems a lot more shiny than one that says "Mr. Jayd16, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard... Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul"

Political parties, social networks, religions. these are all engineered systems. All of them including AI involve people. For starts nobody is going to do the massive amount of work to train a useless AI that is skeptical and cynical. Imaginination, Agreeability (which causes hallucinations) is a feature, not a bug. In humans and in LLMs.

Yes it’s final form of the evolution that social media started.

Village idiot used to be found out because no one in the village shared the same wingnut views.

Partisan media gave you two polls of wingnut views to choose for reinforcement.

Social media allowed all village idiots to find each other and reinforce each others shared wingnut views of which there are 1000s to choose from.

Now with LLMs you can have personalized reinforcement of any newly invented wingnut view on the fly. So can get into very specific self radicalization loops especially for the mentally ill.

Reddit? Or this site? Sort of? Some people voted for my comment, that surely means that I'm right about something, rather than them just liking it, right?