the short answer: this sort of nerd loves signifiers but loathes depth

Don’t try to rationalise it, it’s CEO speak :

He’s not making a comparison to Hitchhikers, he’s trying to attract attention.

N.B.: I am a few drinks into writing this, apologies in advance if it comes out unintelligible.

It’s going to be impossible to answer that in a single comment. I think whatever it is, it’s related to why nerd humour/culture is so cringeworthy.

I think for the majority of cases of people making cool things, they are well read and are able to call upon a breadth and depth of knowledge from their domain. As you move away from creator to consumer, that level of knowledge is less and less common. Plus, generally, if a creative work is trying to crystallise a range of ideas and make them understandable for the consumer, then they are actively allowing the consumer to be able to not engage with the source material for those ideas.

So then you have these well-read creatives making interesting, beloved works of art that hold a lot of social capital. You have people consuming these works at all kinds of levels of engagement. In many cases, especially within nerdy circles, works become exalted, and even if you don’t engage with those works at all, you are still expected to revere those works, lest you draw the ire of the nerds above you who love these works.

So IMO, and as you have pointed out, it’s highly unlikely that there’s any real influence from Adams on the output of these bots. They namedrop him to hopefully garner more social capital. It’s the same reason why I learned how to play “Still Alive” on guitar to impress nerds at my university. It’s the same reason I used to read wikipedia plot summaries for marvel movies while I was working at a small search company.

Anyway the better answer to all this would be to say: watch the “Darmok” episode of star trek TNG. Which I have not seen (lmfao). But I have listened to the official star trek podcast episode (guested by Reza Aslan, notable linguist) that discusses it, and my understanding is that it better encapsulates some of why this is all so fucked.

also, given we all know who and what musk is, it’s a lot funnier to pin a long list of failures (a lot of which were precipitated by musk’s terrible management and tantrums, and by the culture of fear he creates in the companies he buys) on the chest of the guy who paid a lot of money to falsely be called a chief engineer

How was that a surprise to anyone? I'd wager indiscriminately scraping the web at this point will net you more words of GPT output than, for instance, Douglas Adams books.

Elon: "I created OpenAI! It only exists because of me!" Also Elon: "I created this new AI, which I copied from OpenAI, because it was... mine all along?"