... I shouldn’t argue with the AI because it doesn’t care what I think, when my whole point was that I wasn’t asking it to care what I think—I was asking it to respond to factual evidence. It explicitly admits it doesn’t do that.

Even so, there is a matter of intentionality, which it doesn't have.

It's a software program that produces words in a row, and that's about it. We can interpret some of those words as having meaning, but that's up to us. The words don't inherently have any meaning, as there is no conscious or even rational entity behind them that can have the intent to convey meaning. It can't "admit" to anything, nor lie about anything, as that kind of connotes that is has intentionality. I'm not sure it can even be wrong (or right) except by coincidental mismatch (or match) between how we interpret the words in a row and what's going on in the real world.

Now, there is a school of that that human brains are much the same (though with the addition medium/long term memory and bodily systems messing with it) and that we're really just little machines spouting words to which others may or may not ascribe meaning. But let's not visit that rat hole.

The "words in a row" certainly can be convincing, as that's the sort of pattern they've been trained to come up with, but we have to remember not to anthropomorphise. We can argue with them if we want, but it's like an old man yelling at the TV news. There is no "there" there.

Jim