I think the level at which someone is impressed by AI chatbot conversation may be correlated with their real-world conversation experience/ skills. If you don’t really talk to real people much (a sadly common occurrence) then an LLM can seem very impressive and deep.
I never considered this aspect at all. To me it feels more that some people find it really fascinating that we finally live in the future. I think so too, just with a lot of reservations but fully aware that the genie has been let out of the bottle. Other people are like me. And the rest don’t want any part of this.
However, personal views aside, looking at it purely technically, it’s just a mindless token soup, that’s why I find it weird that even deeply technical people like Andrej Karpathy (there was a post made by him somewhere today) find it fascinating.
I'd argue that talking a lot with real people is a stronger predictor of finding conversations with a chatbot meaningful.