First of you're framing the conversation here by assuming we're talking about "free software" (according to whichever definition).

There's people saying they'd rather talk to an LLM than to me.

I dunno how else to say it to you, but when somebody happily announces that they'd rather talk to a computer than to you, and they are happy this is the future.

That carries certain connotations beyond "external validation".

The person in the top of this thread was claiming "nobody has been robbed".

There's people in these communities that I will never have an intelligent conversation with, again.

I'm not talking about being able to pay bills or anything, I'm just talking about being replaced by a computer program, in a social sense.