> Perhaps "trust" was a bit misplaced here, but I think we can all agree on the idea: Before LLMs, there was intelligence behind text, and now there's not. The I in LLM stands for intelligence, as written in one blog. Maybe the text never was true, but at least it made sense given some agenda.

Nope. A lot of people just wrote stuff. There were always plenty of word salad blogs (and arguably entire philosophy journals) out there.