Interesting! I recently heard the phrasing that AI's aren't intelligent but it's better to think of them as applied stochastic. It does not "understand" the question, it just calculates the most properly answer. That's why they suck at suggestive questions sometimes.

And there is a second AI at play that's important here. The main AI just knows stuff, but doesn't reflect if the answer is appropriate. The second is trained on real people who interact with chatGPT and give feedback on the output.

So it doesn't mention the cutoff because it's self reflexive but because of the second AI that learned not to be too sure about real people's latest developments and didn't learn to differentiate between the living and the dead. I think this is a good way to illustrate this process.