Damn, I tried doing what you did and got a similar response too, down to exact wordings like "short answer, long answer" and "conservative maintenance". I will admit i was too quick to dismiss the accusation in my previous reply.

> If you paste the comment it replies to into ChatGPT, it generates almost exact same answer as that comment.

But would it have generated almost the same comment 4 hours ago, when the comment was posted here?

A few months ago I posted a comment in a thread about some new law that would not have been needed if a law from many years early had not seemingly arbitrarily limited itself to some particular cases. I speculated on some reasons why the original law might have been written that way.

A couple hours later I asked an LLM about it (Perplexity) and it gave the same reasons I had guessed. I checked the links it provided to get a suitable reference if the topic ever came up again...and it turned out my comment was its source!