And, yes, I can prove that a human can understand things when I ask: Hey, go find some books on a subject, then read them and summarize them. If I ask for that, and they understood it, they can then tell me the names of those books because their summary is based on actually taking in the information, analyzing it and reorganizing it by apprehending it as actual information.

They do not immediately tell me about the hypothetical summaries of fake books and then state with full confidence that those books are real. The LLM does not understand what I am asking for, but it knows what the shape is. It knows what an academic essay looks like and it can emulate that shape, and if you’re just using an LLM for entertainment that’s really all you need. The shape of a conversation for a D&D npc is the same as the actual content of it, but the shape of an essay is not the same as the content of that essay. They’re too diverse, and they have critical information in them and they are about that information. The LLM does not understand the information, which is why it makes up citations- it knows that a citation fits in the pattern, and that citations are structured with a book name and author and all the other relevant details. None of those are assured to be real, because it doesn’t understand what a citation is for or why it’s there, only that they should exist. It is not analyzing the books and reporting on them.