They provide information --- some of which is random in nature and only casually reflective of any truth or reality.
And as this example illustrates, they are far from being trustworthy. Their main achievement is to consistently produce functionally acceptable grammar.
An unreliable "answer" is really not an *answer* in the traditional sense of computing. It is merely information waiting to be verified.
No one has to verify every calculation in a spreadsheet. If they reasonably needed to do so, spreadsheets would be more like an LLM --- and a lot less useful.
Is an answer that is correct by chance the same as one that is correct by reason?
If I ask an LLM “What is the capital of France?” and it answers “Paris.”, then it has provided an answer by any reasonable definition of the term.
This anti-AI weirdness where people play word games to deny what AI is clearly doing has to stop.
It answered "Mbabane" along with information about the fact that the country is now called Eswatini.
There was no mention of the fact that there are actually 2 capitals --- Mbabane (the administrative capital) and Lobamba which serves as the executive seat of government.
The point being --- any "answer" from an LLM is questionable. An unreliable or incomplete answer is information but it is really not an *answer* (in the traditional computing sense) if additional work is reasonably required to verify and prove it as such.
If that’s the point, then you should say that instead of saying that they don’t provide answers. They very clearly do provide answers and this weird rhetorical nonsense is grating.
If a human got the question wrong, would you conclude that “humans don’t provide answers”? Getting questions wrong is normal. It doesn’t mean that the entity class that got the questions wrong is incapable of giving answers, it just means they aren’t perfect.
In the realm of computing, it is not. This is why people use them.
People *expect* computers to provide quick and reliable answers. Or at least they used to --- before LLMs.
I ask an LLM “What is the capital of France?” and it answers “Paris.”
If you see that and say “LLMs don't provide answers.” then you have let your ideological opposition to AI overwhelm your reason and mislead you into saying very silly things that are obviously untrue, and you really need to reconsider your position so that you stop doing that.
You can say that they are unreliable all you want. You can still criticise LLMs! Just don’t get so twisted out of shape that you start speaking utter nonsense.