[arkh]

The original meaning of mechanical Turk is about a chess hoax and how it managed to make people think it was a thinking machine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Turk

The current LLM anthropomorphism may soon be known as the silicon Turk. Managing to make people think they're AI.

[6510]

The mechanical Turk did something truly magical. Everyone stopped moaning that automation was impossible because most machines (while some absurdly complex) were many orders of magnitude simpler than chess.

The initial LLMs simply lied about everything. If you happened to know something it was rather shocking but for topics you knew nothing about you got a rather convincing answer. Then the arms race begun and now the lies are so convincing we are at viable robot overlords.