[lordnacho]

So now we'll have to investigate what "original" means?

From what I can see, AI is absolutely able to create new work. Things that are not in the dataset, but look like they could be. This is pretty much what generalising means, they can make a wide variety of things that aren't actually in the original set but can hide in that set pretty well.

When you are an original piece of culture, what do you mean by it?

[keiferski]

Can an AI write a story about living as an artist in NYC in 2026, the cultural environment, etc. without that information being added to the dataset immediately as it happens?

It seems pretty obvious to me that there are cultural trends which are happening instantaneously and aren’t merely some sort of consequence of past historical data.

[seanmcdirmid]

Ideally the AI would get none of its world knowledge from its model weights and would rely entirely on context. This is just an ideal though, we haven’t figured out how to completely separate world knowledge from the model.

[lordnacho]

But how could something be a cultural trend without some sort of anchoring in history?

I don't see why a computer (or a person) couldn't make up a plausible sounding story about a NYC artist of the present day? You would just reference things that don't change that much (artists having a boheme type existence, wild inequality in who can live off their art, NYC being a sort of place where people go to become successful).