In the past, when people built programs to extract text from PDFs, they didn't wrap them in a chat interface which claimed it had the human cognitive ability to "read" human languages.

They could have done this. They could have claimed they'd recreated human vision and hyped it as the beginning of a full human brain, but they didn't.

Instead, they used real technical terms like "OCR" (optical character recognition), which gave people a much more accurate understanding of the technology and didn't encourage silly analogies to humans.