ELIZA from 1966 was enough to convince people that computer program they were talking to was human. People are now being sold on getting answers to their questions via natural language prompts and those answers are pretty much plausibly sounding sentences that happen to be right sometimes due to probability calculations.
Bayesian statistics is very different from what's being taught up until high school (at least here) and is foundational to earlier machine learning applications like spam filters. It's hard to imagine understanding what LLMs do without basics.