It was never a factoid machine

Funny tidbit about the word "factoid": its original meaning was "an item of unreliable information that is reported and repeated so often that it becomes accepted as fact", but the modern usage is "a brief or trivial item of news or information".

This means that the modern usage of "factoid" is in itself a factoid, and that in the old sense LLMs sort of are factoid machines.

Note that I'm not saying the modern use is wrong. Languages evolve, and words taking on new meanings doesn't mean the new meanings are "wrong" (and surprisingly words changing to mean the opposite of what they used to mean isn't all that uncommon either.)