[keiferski]

This is a bit like saying “there are only five fundamental flavors” and everything is some combination of them.

Maybe, but that has basically zero effect on the experience of actually eating food. Just because the form may be the same doesn’t mean an LLM will be able to supply original content.

[awongh]

I’m not sure I understand the analogy. You could say that the reason why artificial flavors work in food is because we know how to recreate flavors from first principle chemistry. The dislike of the artificialness of cheetos also doesn’t stop many many people from eating them.

I would say human made slop writing isn’t any better or worse quality than LLM writing.

Knowing if it was made by a real person makes a difference to me, but I also know it won’t to everyone.

[keiferski]

Just because the form of a story is the same as another story does not imply that the content is interchangeable.

I could write you a story right now about being an expat living in Poland in 2026. It’s unclear to me how an LLM would have the cultural knowledge or experience to write such a story that is actually accurate and up to date, without already having something like my story already in its dataset.

[lordnacho]

Yeah but you would just be doing the same thing: mashing up some known information about humans and Poland. You would pick plausible names like Marek or Piotr, plausible places like Warsaw or Gdansk, and some random flavour of story that is either completely general across cultures (hero's journey) or some local tale from Poland.

Shakespeare did the same, so I wouldn't blame you for it.

[keiferski]

I am an expat in Poland, that’s why I used it as an example. The point being that I have knowledge of that experience that is not written down in an LLM dataset.