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Like I said, it’s not good, but I was using it to falsify the claim that LLMs can only produce concepts that are in the training set or prompt.

If I were using this for real I’d ask it to iterate, to create a story arc, etc.



Well, all of the conceptual elements it used are in the training set; it just combined them in ways that don't even make syntactic sense. Yes, I know we "just" combine ideas too when we're creating. My point is that I don't think it was producing new concepts, just slamming words together in grammatically acceptable ways. Do any of its absurd phrases mean anything to you? They don't mean anything to me. I could create something conceptually sound based on its absurd phrases, but that's still me doing the work where the LLM is acting as an algorithmic name generator.

I'd be curious if it could explain those concepts and use them in consistent ways. If so, I'd be curious how novel it could really get. Is it just going to be repackaging well-trod scifi and fantasy devices, or studied philosophy? Or could it offer us a story with truly new understandings? For example, to my knowledge, House of Leaves is something truly novel. It's probably not the first book with intentional printing errors, or with layered narration, or with place-horror, etc. But I think House of Leaves is pretty widely considered a sort of "step forward" for literature, having a profound impact on the reader unlike anything that came before it.

(A really serious discussion will require analyzing exactly what that impact is and how it's novel.)




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