Personally seen this behavior a few times in real life, often with worrying implications. Generously I’d like to believe these people use extruded text as a place to start thinking from, but in practice is seems to me that they tend to use extruded text as a thought-terminating behavior.
IRL, I find it kind of insulting, especially if I’m talking to people who should know better or if they hand me extruded stuff instead of work they were supposed to do.
Online it’s just sort of harmless reply-guy stuff usually.
Many people simply straight-up believe LLMs to be genie like figures as they are advertised and written about in the “tech” rags. That bums me out sort of in the same way really uncritical religiosity bums me out.
HBU?
Tracing and verifying sources is standard academic writing procedure. While you definitely can’t trust anything an LLM spits out, you can use them to track down certain types of sources more quickly than search engines. On the other hand, I feel that’s more of an indictment of the late-stage enshittification of search engines, not some special strength of LLMs. If you have to use one, don’t trust it, demand supporting links and references, and verify absolutely everything.