You're ignoring all the times the stackoverflow answers also provide zero information, so this is not a balanced assessment. Prompting LLMs correctly to get high quality answers is a skill.
There can be value in SO answers, there can not be in LLM as it's just automated plagiarism without understanding anything.
I'm old enough to remember the memes campaigning to rename "software engineering" to "googling StackOverflow", so plagiarism isn't a point against the value of an LLM, and given the case of an LLM made by StackOverflow using StackOverflow data it's also not a legal issue.
I’m not sure understanding is an inherent issue either. When I Google ”weather lisbon,” Google spits out a number. The app doesn’t ”understand” anything, but it still helps me plan my day.
Then it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: a) "ChatGPT is stupid! Also, plagiarism! No value!" b) " I wrote a carelessly bad prompt and it responded with a seemingly bad answer!" c) " This confirms my biases!"
I find that when I provide it with enough context and a set of requirements (as I would with a non-AI engineer), it's very good at problem solving.
Conjecture. We lack a mechanistic understanding of "understanding", so you can't make this claim. Human answers are also fallible, so how do you know that human cognition isn't also statistical pattern matching similar to what's used in LLMs? If it is, then they are understanding, their understanding just has flaws.
That's like saying "reading the future from chicken entrails is a skill".
Accuracy rates much, much higher than chance are not accidental. While you're pointing to a valid failure mode of LLMs, you're not using the correct words to describe it which is leading you to say nonsense.
If I could read the future from chicken entrails with as high a reply accuracy as I get from ChatGPT, then I would fully endorse that too.