Comment by btrettel

I had similar thoughts before. It's worth thinking about what attorneys will do in response to rejections based on LLMs reproducing ideas. I'm a former patent examiner, and attorneys frequently argue that the examiners showed "hindsight bias" when rejecting claims. The LLM needs to produce the idea without being led too much towards it.

Something like clean-room reverse engineering could be applied. First ask a LLM to describe the problem in a way that avoids disclosing the solution, then ask an independent LLM how that problem could be solved. If LLMs can reliably produce the idea in response to the problem description, that is, after running a LLM 100 times over half show the idea (the fraction here is made up for illustration), the idea's obvious.