> radically different nature of our AI interlocutor
It's the training data that matters. Your "AI interlocutor" is nothing more than a lossy compression algorithm.
Most AI Chatbots do not rely on their training data, but on the data that is passed to them through RAG. In that sense they are not compressing the data, just searching and rewording it for you.
Yet it won't be easy not to anthropomorphize it, expecting it to just know what we mean, as any human would. And most of the time it will, but once in a while it will betray its unthinking nature, taking the user by surprise.