It’s algorithmically/randomly generating text without understanding. What it the proper way of using it? Fake papers? Political bs? Bad Hemingway (or Shakespeare or Chaucer or…). It’s noise that looks like sentences.
The world's most expensive Lorem Ipsum generator?
It's trained with a corpus of research papers it mines from in response to a search prompt. It's a bit like if Google were to haphazardly compose a website from the first 20 pages of search results, or worse.
Composition is the novelity here, and we should judge it based on how well it can select and compose. Turns out not that well yet; judgement is lacking. Its performance depends on how easy it is to get it right for a given query and goes down the more difficult the query is, also because "is actually good" weights are not usually part of the input dataset to begin with (since the researchers hope to one day build something that comes up with its own notion of that - but so far have no idea how).
It's a bit like inventing pagerank and then stopping there, too.
That's a useful mental analogy to understand the limitations of this tech for now in case you ever go "I know, I will solve my problem with ML".
One of the ways I see people get this wrong is not believing in "performance goes down the more difficult the query is", because we tend to mistake complexity for difficulty, and a more complex and specific prompt helps these models produce convincing output a lot currently (i.e., prompt engineering). But that is not demonstrating understanding - it is handing the model a better set of training wheels.