> The magic and absurdity of life is a necessary thing to create such works.

These two points seem slightly conflicting. Why if a human is truly more creative than AI, must it experience "the magic and absurdity of life" if it can be creative without "combining things into output"? Is a creative human then just not splicing and recombining their experiences into their creative output? And therefore, if an AI had more data that mirrors that experience in some way would it be sufficiently creative to create something "truly original"?

My view is that intelligence and creativity is all just purely recombination. AI can do that well just as humans can. The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.

An important distinction seems to lie in a human having original experiences to draw from, while an AI has only "data that mirrors" experiences.

True for a lot of current AI. With more robotic bodies, loads more access to cameras/audio/satellite/science measurements, an AI can have original experience on a level that can only be described as god-like compared to humans.

The part that AI can't (yet) truly replicate is 'feelings/emotions'. Experiences such feeling dread, loneliness, happiness. Or being anxious, nervous or having goosebumps. You can describe all these states but they are differently experienced for each individual and also dependent on each unique situation.

Ofcourse this also then comes down to how you exactly define emotions.

Even then, it’s not really clear to me that an android with the exact appearance of a person will have the same experiences. They aren’t biological creatures with millions of years of evolution behind them.

Though I think there's at least one more important thing missing, namely the ability to form memories - to incorporate recent context into the model's weights. I don't think it's a coincidence that this is a very complex process in humans as well (involving sleep and dreams as neccessary mechanisms).

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.

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.

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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xizttM_Cbuc

It's basically the Turing test.

Nobody did any original research, you didn't discover gravity, and you didn't participate in any historically significant events.

Yet we say that people who have been through education know about such things.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Does reading an infinite number of cookbooks mean you know what the ingredients in each taste like?

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.

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.

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.

Asking another person or Fable what it feels like to eat a hamburger will give you a description of what it feels like. It will not give you the actual feeling. You are merely repeating words that someone else has told you. The description of something is not equivalent to the experience that comes from doing it yourself, as an experiencing subject. Reading a war journal about being in battle is not equivalent to the actual experience of being in battle.

To illustrate the point again: if we gathered ten people that all spoke different languages and gave them a hamburger, they would all gain the knowledge of what it feels like to eat a hamburger, even if none of them are able to communicate this to the others in language.

I can't keep repeating myself.

If I've understood you correctly, your objection is that this description is second hand, rather than being a description of the model's own feelings.

Like if I write a description of what it's like being a soldier in a war zone, despite never having been a soldier and never having been in a war zone. Perhaps I can write something plausible if I've read enough and use my imagination.

snakeboy (whose commend started this subthread) seems to claim that having real experiences (not just having learned of others' experiences through reading) is a prerequisite to creating something 'truly original'.

Is that your position also?

If so, is there any possible demonstration that could change your mind?

Like if I write a description of what it's like being a soldier in a war zone, despite never having been a soldier and never having been in a war zone. Perhaps I can write something plausible if I've read enough and use my imagination.

This is not an answer of what it feels like to be a soldier in a war zone. It is your guess. You do not know, you are imagining. It may be "plausible" for a novel, but that is not what we are talking about.

snakeboy (whose commend started this subthread) seems to claim that having real experiences (not just having learned of others' experiences through reading) is a prerequisite to creating something 'truly original'.

It would seem to imply that if you are creating something merely by reading others' work and synthesizing it, and then rearranging it into something else, all without actually using your own novel experience – then yes, it is not truly original. It is like writing a book about living in New York City by reading books about living in New York City. Your work is second-hand by definition.

I do think so. The difference is that, even apart from synthesis, the creative human knows how to filter out the shit ideas from the clever, subtle ones—LLMs seem to just run with the first…um, thought that… um, comes out of their head.

I suspect knowing that you've on to something special probably does require "human experience", woe, melancholy, "the human condition", reflecting on the brevity of life…

Yes!

Aside from the more fundamental questions about the nature of cognition and what constitutes intelligence, there's a practical matter: humans have life to learn from. We have a lifetime of persistent memories, an identity, a social life, physical interactions with the world of many qualitatively different kinds, and we're taken on a lifelong journey into different studies, workplaces, and living environments by the biological need to survive.

Even if human creativity is in some sense also recombinative at its core, we have a very different set of inputs from LLMs. Even under the (almost certainly false) assumption that human condition is basically similar in structure to an LLM, we should expect some differences in outputs based on these profound differences in inputs.

I agree, yet I also think AI is extremely limited in terms of new creativity.

My guess is that humans operate on some deeper level. Much like the grokking model example where it easily trained on the training data, but only later did it really start to understand the deeper problem space and 'grok' the problem, I think LLMs are doing something similar with human thought. LLMs can throw more compute, but they are still lacking some introspection/drive that leads to the better creativity of humans. Grokking this from the training data might not be possible, or it might take some fundamentally different approach, or even an imperfection in humans that LLMs don't have (ego/drive?).

This isn't to say that LLMs could never do it, but the cost to do so might require magnitudes more scale in training times and size. Or it could be in the next model released. Or maybe they already can, but that gets trained out in favor of overall more general correctness accross all domains.

I still doubt that we have the knowledge to describe all of our human desires as mere results of our brain interacting with the nervous system either. There are many processes going on besides analysis and synthesis. If I plan on doing something extraordinary, I don't only sit there, think, and try to rearrange some pieces from memory. I'll go look around, touch, taste, re-explore and expand the perception my environment has to offer. Further, my perception can vary by the minute and I could even try to bring in a touch of chance whenever I feel like.

Wittgenstein's "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" might be fitting here, yet language still continues to evolve.

I have a gamer friend that believes, having played 100's of 1st-person games, that he has had rich experiences because of it.

I reflect back on a day my family and I set out to hike through Arches National Park (still a Monument at the time, I believe) and the heat was such that my oldest daughter seemed in danger of going into runaway heat exhaustion. I began to panic as we were so far along on the hike already that even returning to where we parked seemed to pose danger for her.

There was little to no "coverage" (shade) along the trail and the heat and sun were intense that day—we had passed almost nothing. Finding the smallest of bushes to provide minimal shade for her, I scouted ahead on the trail to look for some kind of larger area where there would be enough shade, perhaps a breeze even, to allow her to bring her core body temperature back down.

Fortunately I found just that. (And it turned out that, in the news later, two hikers within a few hundred miles of us had in fact died that day as it was a record heat wave for the area.)

I think somehow that me and my daughters experiences that day, when actual death was perhaps on the table, was something a "virtual environment" can never really offer.

No, they aren't. I'm not sure why it's such a popular narrative that all art is just some kind of recombination of existing things; it's not. Actual lived experiences are unique and impact what is created. Novels written by people in post-Revolutionary France are not the same as novels written by post-WW1 France. Events in history shape culture and introduce new ideas and experiences that weren't there before.

The gap is that the data humans have access to is much more analogue, emotional, and grounded in the real world compared to the data that AI is currently trained on.

That's the problem with your argument, right here. Emotions are not merely portable "data," and framing this way is a problem from the start.

I don't think you get human experiences without actually being human. The most perfect LLM copy of a mind is just the copy of externalized output.

I would like to see art that was "created in a vacuum" so to speak. I am not aware of any. A first time poet who had never read any poetry or prose or heard a tale told? A painter who had been blind since birth and just handed a canvas, oils?

(To be pedantic, the person you quoted said art was recombining their experiences which you took as existing things.)

The older I get, the more "nothing new under the sun" returns again and again.

- St John of Damascus

I once tried telling it to write a fantasy novel for me because I didn't know what to read next. Gave it some examples of books I have enjoyed in the past so it would have an idea of my taste...God was that awful. Absolutely terrible idea.

AI is not coming for fantasy authors jobs any time soon!

Most good fiction authors are trying to communicate a story that’s forming in their minds. Even when they get stuck, they are usually not stuck because they just don’t know anyone to ask. It would’t be their voice anymore. Some do seek input and those might experiment with llms for ideas. Using llms for research, technical questions, grammar, synonym sentences, word selection, etc makes sense too.

I’d agree with OP for people generating full stories through llms. While I say that, I know a very young person who told a while back (like early ChatGPT 4 time) they use it to write fan fiction for books or characters they like.

Do I reflect on the objectively correct structure of the story? Do I "agree" with everything Dostoevsky is saying? Not really.

I don't know if this offends literature people or not. But this sure as hell is incompatible with the AI bro paradigm in which all thought can be objectively reduced to some shared standard to benchmark on.

My position will be read into as deep irrationality from many opposing positions, but it's fine.

Now, none of this doesn't "preclude* the ability for AI to have the same kinds of network effects. Of course it can - that's what I've been saying for the longest time. But don't confuse, becoming integrated with society, with this ideal of superhuman X.

Now of course, you could argue, "there is no such thing as anything else besides becoming integrated with society. There is no other standard that works." Very good! Darwinian-adjacnet positions are interesting. This is a position - but then don't claim it's equivalent, or god forbid, the exact same, as the "super AGI" ontology. These require fundamentally different assumptions about what justified what, and an attempt to try and pretend otherwise is sophistry.

But I want to say that non-fiction books are a lot more resistant to LLMs than you might think. I'm reading two non-fiction books currently. And both (https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/17801.Underground, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/44824581-a-k-pop-live) could not have been written by an LLM. One is based on in-person interviews that were hard to set up, and the is based on a log of sources a number of which are going to live events.

Not every book fits this pattern of course. But even a more straight forward book (https://www.goodreads.com/series/139929-designers-dragons) will often rely on sources that are not easily accessed by an LLM, they may not be digitized, or they may not be accessible in your common digital collections.

I 100% think LLMs can do good synthesis work, don't really think we have the tooling/checking in place for them to write a competent non-fiction book yet, but that will certainly happen, but I still think the best and most interesting non-fiction remains firmly in the realm of humans.

(Also, a lot of non-fiction is memoirs, travelogues, etc. which LLM can't really replace unless you're dictating to it.)

Everything else is just not that interesting to a human.

  LLMs are really only capable of combining different things into output

it's a real question. I've seen a lot of people stating that the human mind "is more than this" as if it was obvious

Like a human can reach into the chaos of their own emotions and pull something unique out. There is some layer of the human experience where ideas can ferment and change based on all your memories is weird ways, and LLMs completely lack this, which makes things LLMs create very blunt and obvious. Like there is no nuance to anything they do.

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?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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

Superhero Wars Trek 42 - the latest franchise installment, billion dollar Hollywood budget, financed and produced by billionaires, audience tested committee-made script, lots of people involved, designed primarily to push merchandise.

Personal Story - a movie about someone's personal reality or fantasy, something typically not made by studios because the story isn't profitable to a wide audience, painstakingly generated and edited by one person using AI, designed primarily to tell a story.

I put up a different strawman because your strawman is too beatable. As humans, of course we're all interested in what other humans have to say. But you haven't explained why you feel people can't use AI to say things, or why AI output can't be based on a real human's life experiences.

Personally, it seems like movie studios are the ones with only 7 stories to tell, and I've seen the movie and its sequel, the prequel, the requel, the remake, the gritty reboot, the musical, and the animated series. I'm excited that AI will let people skip the studio gatekeepers to tell some new stories for a change.