intended audience was other academics

You're being awfully charitable calling anyone involved with this paper or npj AI "academics".

Like these last two are worded in a way that makes it clear what the author thinks is right:

Do we want the systems that increasingly run our lives steered by a few private companies, or held more widely accountable? And do we want a shared world we can make sense of together, or one so flooded with synthetic stuff that no one can tell what is real?

But look at the not-so-hidden assumptions: that AI is going to run our lives. As if it's a foregone conclusion. The author doesn't leave any room for pushing back on that premise.

"These giant orphan-crushing mallets are inevitably going to crush all the orphans. So we really should be talking about whether the orphan-crushing mallets should be wielded by polite orphan-crushing-mallet wielders or rude orphan-crushing-mallet wielders."

How about we fucking throw the orphan-crushing malletsLLMs and anyone making them into volcanoes? But the article makes no allowance for that. It doesn't want you thinking such thoughts because that's bad for Nvidia's stock price.

Plus, the assumption that they'll "run our lives" implies that LLMs have at least some real-world application, which isn't a given either. By smuggling that assumption in, they're trying to sell you on the idea that LLMs aren't just a total scam the way, say, blockchain was all along.