Comment by hashhar

What you're describing is very close to what the thought experiment of Chinese Room (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room).

But yes, it's unfortunate that when the next tokens are joined token and laid out in the form of a sentence it appears "intelligent" to people. However if you instead lay out the individual probabilities of each token instead then it'll be more obvious what ChatGPT/LLMs actually do.