ChatGPT is best thought of as an information compiler. It responds to requests by putting together the information, data, facts and figures, and people's opinions it has read into coherently organized and grammatically correct text. This output is the smart bit. It is pretty impressive compared to other such systems, but not really when compared to what good writers can produce. It might compare well with the work of mediocre writers but its output is conventional and rather repetitively structured. It will default to listing things when it can, for instance, and, as it learned through a frequency-based analysis, it will use more frequent, thus simpler, constructions.