I don't think that's quite accurate.

The "understand it well enough to explain it to a professor" clause is carrying a lot of weight here - if that part is fulfilled, then yeah, you're actually learning something.

Unless of course, all of the professors are awful at their jobs too. Most of mine were pretty good at asking very pointed questions to figure out what you actually know, and could easily unmask a bullshit artist with a short conversation.

It's more like if played a song on Guitar Hero enough to be able to pick up a guitar and convince a guitarist that you know the song.

Code from ChatGPT (and other LLMs) doesn't usually work on the first try. You need to go fix and add code just to get it to compile. If you actually want it to do whatever your professor is asking you for, you need to understand the code well enough to edit it.

It's easy to try for yourself. You can go find some simple programming challenges online and see if you can get ChatGPT to solve a bunch of them for you without having to dive in and learn the code.

No he's right. Before ChatGPT there was Stack Overflow. A lot of learning to code is learning to search up solutions on the Internet. The crucial thing is to learn why that solution works though. The idea of memorizing code like a language is impossible. You'll obviously memorize some common stuff but things change really fast in the programming world.