> it wrote by itself as part of a larger task I had given it, so it certainly understands transparency

Or it’s a common step or a known pattern or combination of steps that is prevalent in its training data for certain input. I’m guessing you don’t know what’s exactly in the training sets. I don’t know either. They don’t tell ;)

> but it adapts and combines them well to suit my particular requirements. So they seem to handle "novel" pretty well too.

We tend to overestimate the novelty of our own work and our methods and at the same time, underestimate the vastness of the data and information available online for machines to train on. LLMs are very sophisticated pattern recognizers. It doesn’t mean what you are doing specifically is done in this exact way before, rather the patterns adapted and the approach may not be one of their kind.

> is a purely philosophical question

It is indeed. A question we need to ask ourselves.