Yea bag of words isn’t helpful at all. I really do think that “superpowered sentence completion” is the best description. Not only is it reasonably accurate it is understandable, everyone has seen autocomplete function, and it’s useful. I don’t know how to “use” a bag of words. I do know how to use sentence completion. It also helps explains why context matters.
I've been recently using a similar description, referring to "AI" (LLMs) as "glorified autocomplete" or "luxury autocomplete".
Sentence completion does not give it justice, when I can ask a LLM to refactor my repo and come back half an hour later to see the deed done.