Comment by jofla_net
10 hours ago
Cept its not made Linux (in the absence of it).
At any point prior to the final output it can garner huge starting point bias from ingested reference material. This can be up to and including whole solutions to the original prompt minus some derivations. This is effectively akin to cheating for humans as we cant bring notes to the exam. Since we do not have a complete picture of where every part of the output comes from we are at a loss to explain if it indeed invented it or not. The onus is and should be on the applicant to ensure that the output wasn't copied (show your work), not on the graders to prove that it wasn't copied. No less than what would be required if it was a human. Ultimately it boils down to what it means to 'know' something, whether a photographic memory is, in fact, knowing something, or rather derivations based on other messy forms of symbolism. It is nevertheless a huge argument as both sides have a mountain of bias in either directions.
> Cept its not made Linux (in the absence of it).
Neither did you (or I). Did you create anything that you are certain your peers would recognize as more "novel" than anything a LLM could produce?
>Neither did you (or I).
Not that specifically but I certainly have the capability to create my own OS without having to refer to the source code of existing operating systems. Literally "creating a linux" is a bit on the impossible side because it implies compatibility with an existing kernel despite the constraints prohibiting me from referring to the source of that existing kernel (maybe possible if i had some clean-room RE team that would read through the source and create a list of requirements without including any source).
If we're all on the same page regarding the origins of human intelligence (ie, that it does not begin with satan tricking adam and eve into eating the fruit of a tree they were specifically instructed not to touch) then it necessarily follows that any idea or concept was new at some point and had to be developed by somebody who didn't already have an entire library of books explaining the solution at his disposal.
For the Linux thought-experiment you could maybe argue that Linux isn't totally novel since its creator was intentionally mimicking behavior of an existing well-known operating system (also iirc he had access to the minix source) and maybe you could even argue that those predecessors stood on the shoulders of their own proverbial giants, but if we keep kicking the ball down the road eventually we reach a point where somebody had an idea which was not in any way inspired by somebody else's existing idea.
The argument I want to make is not that humans never create derivative or unoriginal works (that obviously cannot be true) but that humans have the capability to create new things. I'm not convinced that LLMs have that same capability; maybe I'm wrong but I'm still waiting to see evidence of them discovering something new. As I said in another post, this could easily be demonstrated with a controlled experiment in which the model is bootstrapped with a basic yet intentionally-limited "education" and then tasked with discovering something already known to the experimenters which was not in its training set.
>Did you create anything that you are certain your peers would recognize as more "novel" than anything a LLM could produce?
Yes, I have definitely created things without first reading every book in the library and memorizing thousands of existing functionally-equivalent solutions to the same problem. So have you so long as I'm not actually debating an LLM right now.