1. Ars Technica's (OP website) audience includes tech enthusiast people who don't necessarily have a mental model of LLMs, instruction tuning or RLHF.
2. why would this "study" exist? - for the reason computer science academics conduct study on whether LLMs are empirically helpful in software engineering. (The therapy industrial complex would also have some reasons to sponsor this kind of a research, unlike SWE productivity studies where the incentive is usually the opposite.)
For the record, my initial question was more rhetorical in nature, but I am glad you took the time to share your thoughts as it gave me (and hopefully others) perspectives to think about.
2. why would this "study" exist? - for the reason computer science academics conduct study on whether LLMs are empirically helpful in software engineering. (The therapy industrial complex would also have some reasons to sponsor this kind of a research, unlike SWE productivity studies where the incentive is usually the opposite.)