Modern online LLMs also expose the thinking process. A few years ago, they didn't have that feature at all, so the first answer appeared to be the only answer. As far as I can tell, it really was the only answer. The obvious problem with that is the lack of processing. A human could come up with a few stupid responses, but would quickly filter out the worst ones and only say the one that seemed most reasonable. An old LLM didn't seem do that at all. It would just spit out the first version and let the user deal with the stupidity.

Modern LLMs also spit out stupid idiot BS, but they have an internal processing step where the answer is refined. In some cases, it takes multiple steps to process the answer. If you want, you can also track the internal "train of thought" to see how the initial wrong answer got kicked out and replaced by something semi-useful.

Regardless, I don't see that a brute forcing it. It looks more like the internal thinking process a human would go through before opening their mouth.