Comment by habinero

It can have anything you like in a training set, you still can't build specific human experiences.

I haven't read War & Peace -- I don't have the patience for Russian literature -- but a much more accessible example is the Vorkosigan series by Lois Bujold. She uses a lot of Tolstoy lol.

While you can read them as fun military scifi, that's not why the series is so good and so famous. In her books, humanity invented two critical things: wormhole FTL travel and uterine replicators.

A lot of the series is exploring how people actually would use and abuse those two things. And then on another layer the books are about her thoughts on parenting, marriage, power, inheritance, and so on.

Good art isn't about accepting someone's opinion that it's good art. Good art impacts you. I think about things differently after those books.

You cannot write a good novel using the algorithmic mean of a lot of different stories.