You realize the generation of the "Chain-of-thought" is also autoregressive, right?

It's not a real reasoning step, it's a sequence of steps, carried out in English (not in the same "internal space" as human thought - every time the model outputs a token the entire internal state vector and all the possibilities it represents is reduced down to a concrete token output) that looks like reasoning. But it is still, as you say, autoregressive.

And thus - in plain english - it is determined entirely by the prompt and the random initial seed. I don't know what that is but I know it's not intent.

You're right that chain of thought is autoregressive, and each step collapses to a new set of tokens.

Ultimately I'm not disputing the mechanics.

Thing is , some people go "Oh wow, it's just like person", others want to counterweight and go "it's all fake, it's just statistics".

But neither of them really want to go into the actual mechanisms and see what they're doing, what they're useful for, or just as importantly for this story: how they can go terribly, terribly wrong.

Anthropomorphism and Anthropodenial are two different forms of Anthropocentrism. But the really interesting story to me is when you look at the LLM in its own right, to see what it's actually doing. And I'll be unapologetic about the exact wording besides! If all I do is hedge each term against either side all the time, I'll never get to talk about the part I care about.