[keiferski]

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.

[wild_egg]

So only people who have fought in wars can write novels about fighting in wars?

[keiferski]

If the aim is to have actual knowledge of the experience, then yes.

Of course not all works need to be this way, and many, many books are written about war by people that haven't been in it.

The broader point is that LLMs cannot have original experiences.

[lordnacho]

But that's purely a matter of having sensors?

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.

[keiferski]

Is a human life, as experienced firsthand, the same as a first person camera recording it?

[lordnacho]

No, it's the same as a camera recording it and digesting it.

[keiferski]

A camera has thoughts? An interior life? Friends?

[wild_egg]

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.

Maybe originality just doesn't mean much then?