I fail to see how changing the output medium from sentences to movie frames is a difference that I need to account for - the principle is the same either way.

I fail to see how changing the output medium from sentences to movie frames is a difference that I need to account for - the principle is the same either way. I feel you are missing an important part of my point here. I am not taking a position on whether LLMs can be said to understand anything at all; I am saying that I seriously doubt that LLMs understand that the language they receive refers to an external world.