ChatGPT has had more conversations than you or I have. And it's conversed with people from a wider range of backgrounds in a wider range of situations.
The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.
I think this is actually a tough one. Yes, I agree that an LLM can never experience this. But -- when a real human needs to translate that experience back into words, it can actually do so just fine.
In other words, when a real human needs to translate an experience into words to share it, A LOT of information is lost. The LLM might actually be better-suited for the the task in your example, even if the point you were driving at stands.
I don't think it's all that difficult. Language is not a 1-1 match to reality. Ergo any entity which is inherently language-only, will fail to accurately describe the experience.
Not if the only result you can judge is also language-only, and the entity has access to a large corpus of descriptions produced by people who have had the experience.
Then you're just comparing descriptions, and you're also dependent on the language skills of the experiencers, and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality. So an LLM may be able to give you the optimal description of a feeling, on par with what a person would give you; but it won't be equivalent to the actual feeling.
>and you're still stuck with the problem that language is not a complete map of reality.
Definitely agreed, but at least when talking about experience we've been stuck in this position for most of human history. How do I know what it's like to eat a hamburger? Perhaps, like the cute visual in Ratatouille there is a deep inner experience but (also like in Ratatouille) when I need to communicate that experience with another person I'm stuck relying on language, and the language is found lacking.
I know it's just a kid's cartoon, but interestingly Ratatouille was making this exact same point -- he really lacks any meaningful way to convey his inner experience. It's locked behind language. The film tackles this by showing an Remy's complex and interesting visual, but his friend only gets the fuzziest, dullest visual when he attempts to communicate it.
Remy's immediate rat & family peers actually _never_ get to understand his experience, and instead later help him out of love an allegiance.
That is descriptive knowledge. Not firsthand qualia.
You may know every detail of the American Civil War, from every book ever written on the topic. You may read every journal from every person that wrote one about it.
You do not have firsthand knowledge of what it was like to participate in the war. Any assumption of that knowledge is a (false) generalization of what you think a person “would have thought or felt” based on contemporary ideas of the personality, psychology, etc. Reading a journal entry about a soldier seeing his comrade killed is not equivalent to actually having that experience yourself.
Stick a camera and a touch sensor on the machine, now it is experiencing the world.
Besides that, there is a lot of value in redigested experience. Quite a lot of history is only really examined in a larger context, where the person describing it cannot have experienced all the original events.
Ah, I see the goal posts shifted. I thought the topic was whether an AI could "give you something truly original in the way many high-quality fictional stories are." Which was then followed by the idea that you cannot have "truly original" outputs unless you also have the corresponding original experiences.
Implication is that virtually none of the novels ever written which include wars are actually original works, since vanishingly few novelists have been in active wars.
That’s a pretty lacking theory of knowledge. How can you know what taste is, if you’re never tasted anything?
If you read a thousand books about living in New York City, is that the same thing as the experiential knowledge that comes from living there in person? I certainly don’t think so.
That's literally what the conversation is about: what is knowledge?
You cannot claim that descriptive knowledge of something is equivalent to experiential knowledge of it, unless you have a theory of knowledge explaining why this is the case.
You asked for a description: "Can you tell me what it feels like to eat a hamburger"
I am sure I Fable (or GPT-5.6-Sol) could answer this question very well. It can probably even tell us what it feels like to eat a hamburger for the first time when you spent the first 18 years of your life as a vegetarian.
The difference is huge. An LLM conversation can contain within it a batshit crazy model of the world and still produce a plausible stream of tokens. No skin in the game. If you don't test your ideas against reality, you don't have a model of reality; you have a model of written human thought. It's critical to understand the difference.