It's tiresome in 2025 to keep on having to use elaborate long winded descriptions to describe how LLMs work, just to prove that one does understand, rather than be able to assume that people generally understand, and be able to use shorter descriptions.

Would "riffing" upset you less than "echoing"? Or an explicit "echoing statistics" rather than "echoing training samples"? Does "Mashups of statistical patterns" do it for you?

The jagged frontier of LLM capabilty is just a way of noting the fact that they act more like a collection of narrow intelligences rather than a general intelligence who's performance might be expected to be more even.

Of course LLMs are built and trained to generate based on language statistics, not to parrot individual samples, but given your objection it's amusing to note that some of the areas where LLMs do best, such as math and programming, are the ones where they have been RL-trained to override these more general language patterns and instead more closely follow the training data.