Why didn't Don Knuth test ChatGPT himself?

As I posted on a different version of this thread, it's grad school's "royal we" in action. Profs have ideas, grad students implement. It's not 100% but that was the way it tended to work in ancient times and this seems to suggest it's still the case.

Which isn't unreasonable, as 2nd year grad students have almost infinite enthusiasm coupled to not always knowing what is and isn't possible. Interesting things can come from these kinds of people.

He has people for that kind of thing. Probably he doesn't want to sign up like giving them his email or phone number or whatever they want. Also he is negatively disposed towards the LLMs if you have read what he thinks about them. Maybe he doesn't want to tempt himself to put 'big tiddy robot gf' in the textbox and then that's everywhere in the news, that Don Knuth typed that.

He doesn't use that much modern tech really, for example email https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

Using ChatGPT would require engaging with email and maybe more stuff that he's not inclined to