I appreciate the article trying to balance the "mechanist" and "cyborgist" viewpoints.

And even if we subscribe to the mechanist viewpoint ("llms are math, bored isn't a useful descriptor") this still feels like it's measuring something useful. In humans we'd probably call this creativity and drive; having no task and deciding to invent a new programming language or to write poetry, instead of asking the same thing in a loop. Those are useful properties. For example if you used an LLM as a personal assistant you would want it to show some initiative and do quirky or useful things on its own without an explicit prompt to do those things. The test performed in the article is just a very extreme case