You are both right, but this armchair psychologist thinks it’s similar to how popular skeuomorphism was in the early day of PC guis and such compared to today.
I think many folks really needed that metaphor in the early days, and I think most folks (including me) easily fall into the trap of treating LLMs like they are actually “thinking” for similar reasons. (And to be fair, I feel like that’s how they’ve been marketed at a non-technical level.)
Stupid mother fuckers.
Anyone old enough to remember knows - politicians have been stupid and reactionary about public access to the internet from its earliest days.
Section 230 of the DMCA is probably the only reason social media as we know it was able to emerge past infancy. (You could argue about whether we might want to put that cat back in the bag, but the earliest discussion forums, leading to sites like Lemmy and Reddit, also could not have existed as we all knew them.)
And frankly, this looks like another part of the march to oligarchy to me. When the only social media sites that can exist are those with owners that have big enough pockets to hire enough people to become responsible for what users post and aggressively control it… (or, shudder what if the end goal is literally nationalized social media)
How awesome thank you!