They can provide text which contains thoughts, reasoning, and empathy, but is that evidence of them having thoughts, reasoning, or empathy?
To paraphrase the Chinese room argument: Put me in a room with infinite time, paper, pencils, filing cabinets, and give me an English language list of instructions for doing all the neural-net calculations required to run an LLM. Slide your prompt under the door, and, after doing all the calculations, I will slide the next word out, and so I will repeat until the response is done.
In this thought experiment, I'm just following the instructions. So, in this case, what is doing the "thinking" or "reasoning" or "empathy" here?