I'm thinking of something that actually processes some form of "thought", in the abstract sense. Even video game AI does that to an extend (granted, there's various techniques depending on the game type), so the term here is actually somewhat appropriate. LLMs don't do that at all though, they're just word guessing based on the texts they were trained upon (while we stick with text gen here at least) and that just so happens to sound like somewhat coherent sentences that can fool someone into thinking that their computer actually talked to them. There never was any sort of thought behind that though. It functions closer to how your mobile keyboard predicts the next word you want to use in its suggestions at the top. It just tries to complete the text it was already presented with. A lot of the illusion here comes actually from the tools used to display this information in a chat like manner, but that's just frontend foolery for the user.