[strangattractor]

Is anyone here aware of LLMs demonstrating an original thought? Something truly novel.

My own impression is something more akin to a natural language search query system. If I want a snippet of code to do X it does that pretty well and keeps me from having to search through poor documentation of many OSS projects. Certainly doesn't produce anything I could not do myself - so far.

Ask it about something that is currently unknown and it list a bunch of hypotheses that people have already proposed.

Ask it to write a story and you get a story similar to one you already know but with your details inserted.

I can see how this may appear to be intelligent but likely isn't.

[Earw0rm]

If I come up with something novel while using an LLM, which I wouldn't have come up with had I not had the LLM at my bidding, where did the novelty really come from?

[kylebyte]

If I came up with something novel while watching a sunrise, which I wouldn't have come up with had I not been looking at it, where did the novelty really come from?

[Earw0rm]

If the sunrise might have inspired the same idea in someone else, that's a good question.

I've no priors as to how original you are, nor how humble, so I mean this in a general, rather than personal, sense.

[jchw]

Well that's the tricky part: what is novel? There are varying answers. I think we're all pretty unoriginal most of the time, but at the very least we're a bit better than LLMs at mashing together and synthesizing things based on previous knowledge.

But seriously, how would you determine if an LLM's output was novel? The training data set is so enormous for any given LLM that it would be hard to know for sure that any given output isn't just a trivial mix of existing data.