Allow me to offer a minor reframing: printing presses aren't about duplicating writing. The printing press exists to mass produce text regardless of how or where the content of the text was produced.

LLMs likewise are text production machines. They don't produce writing, they produce text. Text without writing is what we call slop in the modern parlance.

LLMs are literally throwing random dice into a printing press and making a thousand copies that you then try to huck on the street as if it were a real newspaper.

> Printing presses are about exact duplication of writing.

maybe LLMs are seen to write as well as humans because most humans have poor reading comprehension skills? to wit: OP is using an analogy to make their point, where the components don't need to be an exact fit to make the point (ever heard the phrase "the map is not the territory"?)

A thinking press?