> I'm not sure I see how this is meaningfully different than the threat posed by a search engine.

as being about the world pre-LLMs and post-LLMs, not about Google in 2025 vs ChatGPT in 2025.

For the latter comparison, I agree, and in fact Google probably has an even richer history of people over time.

But like any “X is just Y” explanation, the former comparison fails to address the emergent effects of Y becoming faster/cheaper/better.