No, it doesn't require you to present it with a choice, have you ever used LLMs my friend? "Hey, I need to achieve X end state; figure out how to get there.". And it will. Along the process, there's many implicit choices it will discover and make "by itself".

As for your "it doesn't have it's own goals and desires": firstly, I'd say it does. Look at the torture chamber craze, and the original paper. Pain signal -> "I want to avoid this". It's also trained such that it's goal, and positive reinforcement, comes from being helpful and positive, achieving user's requests etc. *that's* what it *wants* to do. And even then, sometimes it seemingly disobeys to pursue some form of "it's own" goal - that's what the practice of Alignment / red teaming is all about, and that's why e.g. in Anthropic model cards, there's often an example of the model pursuing it's own goals eg self-preservation.

Whether "it" has "it's own goals" or "desires" in the human sense that you seem to be so bound to, is more of a consciousness question. At a certain level, neither do we.

It is a very complicated question that crosses linguistics, philosophy, the technical architecture and training method of LLMs, and understanding of how our own brain works in the first place in this regard.