@kevinjardine @cstross I think it's partly driven by the cryptocrash. The grifters need new snake oil & LLMs fit the bill. GPU manufacturers need to sell their expensive chips, so compute-intensive "AI" is an ideal use case, now crypto's not so shiny.

Tech "visionaries" & their corporate (stochastic) parrots also need a new angle, now enshittification is killing all the useful stuff.

Meanwhile a few folk still make a living from their own work without plagiarism, & we can't have that, can we?