The terms are too unclear here. Can you define what it means to "be able to parse human language"? I'm sure contemporary chatbots score higher on typical reading comprehension tests than most humans. You're certainly correct that llms "only" react to stimuli with a trained response, but I guess anything that isn't consciousness necessarily fits that description
Good point, thanks for calling that out. I'm honestly not sure myself! On further reflection, it's probably a matter of degrees?
So for example, a soldier is trained, and then does what it is told. But the soldier also has a deep trough of contextual information and "decision weights" which can change its decisions, often in ways it wasn't trained for. Or perhaps to put it another way: it is capable of operating outside the parameters it was given, "if it feels like it", because the information the soldier processes at any given time may make it not follow its training.
A dog may also disobey an order after being trained, but it has a much smaller range of information it works off of, and fewer things influence its decision-making process. (genetics being a big player in the decision-making process, since they were literally bred to do what we want/defend our interests)
So perhaps a chat AI, a dog, and a soldier, are just degrees along the same spectrum. I remember reading something about how we can get AI to be about as intelligent as a 2-year-old, and that dogs are about that smart. If that's the case (and I don't know that it is; I also don't know if chat AI is actually capable of "disobeying", much less "learning" anything it isn't explicitly trained to learn), then the next question I'd have is, why isn't the AI able to act and think like a dog yet?
If we put an AI in a robot dog body and told it to act like a dog, would it? Or would it only act the way that we tell it dogs act like? Could/would it have emergent dog-like traits and spawn new dog lineages? Because as far as I'm aware, that's not how AI works yet; so to me, that would mean it's not actually doing the things we're talking about above (re: dogs/soldiers)