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by mh2753 38 days ago
Actually asking ChatGPT this query led it giving me this UUID "550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000" which happens to be a very common example UUID
2 comments

The LLM is mechanistically unable to pick something actually random and outside of its training distribution, so... yep.
If you ask it to construct a UUID character by character you should get a somewhat random one, just because of temperature.
This actually worked well when I asked Gemini to generate a random color, character by character. I was getting Indigo/Electric Indigo a lot if I just asked for a random color on new sessions.
But all LLM output is token by token, which isn't too far from character by character in the case of a UUID. Why is this different? I do not know.
Actually, asking this multiple times to ChatGPT gives me different UUIDs every time, and it checked with a web search that they are not found in public data.
That's because of tokens (and temperature). You could piece back the tokens to parts of existing tokens in public data. And given enough iterations, GPT will probably start showing noticeable patterns (since it's not actually random).