[BoorishBears]

This is knock against you at all, but in a naive attempt to spare someone else some time: remember that based on this definition it is impossible for an LLM to do novel things and more importantly, you're not going to change how this person defines a concept as integral to one's being as novelty.

I personally think this is a bit tautological of a definition, but if you hold it, then yes LLMs are not capable of anything novel.

[Libidinalecon]

I think you should reverse the question, why would we expect LLMs to even have the ability to do novel things?

It is like expecting a DJ remixing tracks to output original music. Confusing that the DJ is not actually playing the instruments on the recorded music so they can't do something new beyond the interpolation. I love DJ sets but it wouldn't be fair to the DJ to expect them to know how to play the sitar because they open the set with a sitar sample interpolated with a kick drum.

[HeinzStuckeIt]

A lot of musicians these days are using sample libraries instead of actually holding real instruments in their hands. It’s not just DJs or electronic producers. It’s remarkable that Brendan Perry of Dead Can Dance, for example, who played guitar and bass as a young man and once amassed a collection of exotic instruments from around the world, built recent albums largely out of instrument sample libraries. One of technology’s effects on culture that maybe doesn’t get talked about as much as outright electronic genres.

[BoorishBears]

It just depends on how you define novel.

Would you consider the instrumental at 33 seconds a new song? https://youtu.be/eJA0wY1e-zU?si=yRrDlUN2tqKpWDCv

[8note]

kid koala does jazz solos on a disk of 12 notes, jumping the track back and forth to get different notes.

i think that, along with the sitar player are still interpolating. the notes are all there on the instrument. even without an instrument, its still interpolating. the space that music and aound can be in is all well known wave math. if you draw a fourier transform view, you could see one chart with all 0, and a second with all +infinite, and all music and sound is gonna sit somewhere between the two.

i dont know that "just interpolation" is all that meaningful to whether something is novel or interesting.

[kazinator]

The DJ's tracks are just tone producing elements.

If he plucked one of the 13 strings of a koto, we wouldn't say he is just remixing the vibration of the koto. Perhaps we could say that, if we had justification. There is a way of using a musical instrument as just a noise maker to produce its characteristics sounds.

Similarly, a writer doesn't just remix the alphabet, spaces and punctuation symbols. A randomly generated soup of those symbols could the thought of as their remix, in a sense.

The question is, is there a meaning being expressed using those elements as symbols?

Or is just the mixing all there is to the meaning? I.e. the result says "I'm a mix of this stuff and nothing more".

If you mix Alphagetti and Zoodles, you don't have a story about animals.

[kazinator]

That is not strictly true, because being able to transfer the style of Van Gogh onto an arbitrary photographic scene is novel in a sense, but it is interpolative.

Mashups are not purely derivative: the choice of what to mash up carries novelty: two (or more) representations are mashed together which hitherto have not been.

We cannot deny that something is new.

[regularfry]

Innovation itself is frequently defined as the novel combination of pre-existing components. It's mashups all the way down.

[BoorishBears]

I'm saying their comment is calling that not something new.

I don't agree, but by their estimation adding things together is still just using existing things.