It is impossible to accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings without being intelligent. To believe otherwise is to believe that intelligence is a vacuous property.
An unintelligent device can accurately imitate the action of intelligent beings within a given scope, in the same way an actor can accurately imitate the action of a fictional character in a given scope (the stage or camera) without actually being that character.
If the idea is that something cannot accurately replicate the entirety of intelligence without being intelligent itself, then perhaps. But that isn't really what people talk about with LLMs given their obvious limitations.
I suppose they really only have to be good at knowing what sort of thing the audience would believe a great thinker would say. As long as the audience does not consist of great thinkers they also cannot know for sure what a great thinker would say.
That's true for unverifiable "talk professions" where there is no grounding and it's all self-referential navel-gazing chatter.
But LLMs are already beyond that in writing code that passes actual tests, proving theorems that are check able with formal methods etc.
The people who still say LLMs are just parrots in 2026 will just keep saying this no matter what, so I don't think it makes sense to argue this point further.
That was probably phrased poorly. If a robot can independently accurately do what an intelligent person would do when placed in a novel situation, then yes, I would say it is intelligent.
If it's just basically being a puppet, then no. You tell me what claude code is more like, a puppet, or a person?
If the idea is that something cannot accurately replicate the entirety of intelligence without being intelligent itself, then perhaps. But that isn't really what people talk about with LLMs given their obvious limitations.