> That seems likely, but we have no way of knowing this.

Only humans can 'know', because all we can be certain about is that humans do such a thing.

If you try to apply that to something other than humans you making up some definition of 'know' based on nothing concrete. Just because something appears to do something like humans doesn't mean it does it. The fact that LLMs use human generated text to generate output should make it obvious that it can mimic all sorts of human behavior by extracting from the text.