It is a side effect of human language and a huge corpus of text it was trained on. I know that people sometimes use this kind of reasoning, words have attached

It is a side effect of human language and a huge corpus of text it was trained on. I know that people sometimes use this kind of reasoning, words have attached meaning and then you can do some simple reasoning. I would say though, that it is not a real reasoning. It can do some of the things real reasoning can do, but the same as with people it can get attached to the meaning of words too much. When a person can't go beyond that they are called lazy or sloppy thinkers. It is a heuristic, not a real reasoning. I think it is a cheaper processing and it is of course useful, but it has its limits. For me it will mean that ChatGPT will not get to see some patterns that in creative works would be obvious for a creative human. As you said, when things are not in its training set it can struggle. If there is a plausible looking text for the question I asked it will give it to me, that's how it is designed. For example I asked it about Windows command line debugger - CDB. It gave me an example command line for it: cdb -c "your-app" -o "logfile". It is very wrong. -c requires an argument which are debugging commands to run on start, -o is to attach to all created attached processes. Real command line looks something like this: cdb -logo "logfile" "your-app" (and it still does not exactly behave as you would imagine having experience with Unix CLI). The problem ChatGPT has with CDB is probably, because it has much much bigger corpus on Unix-like command line tools and because the documentation for CDB is abysmal. From this ChatGPT session I would have more examples. I'm not saying it is useless. It just is not designed to do that. It might improve or there might be an another algorithm needed on top or instead of what it does use. For me it is like a kind of a step up from a search engine. It helps me to find something to start with. When I get to some details it is often wrong. I get a starting point from it and then find a proper source for the rest.