“No one is telling ChatGPT what to write for you.”
That says a lot. You could tell it to write a program to do your taxes but the specific steps to do it would come from inside your head.
I’m a programmer and would like to see some of the source code within AI, or a flowchart, or like to ask an AI programmer about what the software is doing.
Maybe there aren’t AI programmers, just programmers doing what the AI hypesters tell them to do.
This is how it developed what passes for language. Then using this language (and continually updating it), it devours more content and keeps refining its language.
And, though it has not been mentioned, I think we can presume that it has been scrubbing websites. I have asked questions that would require CHATGPT to have read some pretty obscure sites (questions, for example, about what was found in the Dead Sea Scrolls).