No they didn’t. They were given directives to do this spout this shit. Clickbait “research” nonsense, meant to fraudulently advertise LLMs as being more capable than they are

Kind of wish people had actually read the article instead of downvoting you into oblivion since it was very snarky and skeptical and a delight to read.

Edit to add an excerpt:

This is not intelligence at work; this whole thing is essentially a melange of human-written stories that have been chewed into tiny chunks and then reassembled by an algorithm at the cost of an entire small nation’s power consumption.