I agree that LLMs are still just a way to sample from a probabilistic model of things humans say. And in this case the model seems to be pretty darn accurate.
A pretty staggering amount of human discourse consists of ad hominem attacks and accusing each other of being foolishly committed to various real or perceived allegiances. For example the current version of Godwin’s Law around here has conversations gravitating toward people accusing each other of being AI boosters or AI haters.
It's far more likely that the AI got this "controversial idea" from human-written text saying that other humans are groupthinky, not from observing humans being groupthinky.
Or more simply, because that's what "controversial" (from the prompt) means: something few believe that most don't.
It scraped Reddit, if anything it learned that humans are self-loathing and spiteful.
Exactly