I've seen this sort of response a lot lately, both for GPT and all the image generators.

Google, and all the other search engines, literally show snippets of the original content to display search results, and have had copyright infringement lawsuits over this.

Yet somehow, it's taken these AI, which generally aren't just block-quoting things unless you ask them to (and often getting it wrong if you do), for non-lawyers to start asking that question.

I think that just indicates it's more blatant. With search engine results I can click through to the original source. That's attribution, at least to the laymen. ChatGPT has no such thing.

I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of them.

GPT definitely has some kind of internal model of things and how they relate to other things, and the capacity to express those relations in different ways.

Whether this is functionally the same as the model in my head, or some analog to it, or if such descriptions are merely cute but misleading anthropomorphisation, is far beyond my knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, and indeed machine learning.

> I selected a few sentences from the given response, asked DuckDuckGo to find them, and got zero hits for any of them.

Science.

Is it any different than an infinitely capable human reading the entire internet and using the knowledge it gained to answer questions?

Google or GPT?

Either way I don't know. Might be the same, but that might be an unwarranted anthropomorphisation.