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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

> You literally couldn’t get GPT to come up with a single novelty if you tried. It’s all remixing existing content, and again, doing so in a way to fit the average of the dataset.

So if I ask chatGPT to make up a poem about the power of friendship, and it must involve a unicorn and a jackelope, it will give me that. What's not novel about it? Isn't it pretty much what any person would do, mash up some related words?

What does novelty mean in this context?

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Leaving aside the question of whether that combination of images is novel… In your example, all the proposed novelty is specified in the prompt. ChatGPT didn’t come up with it, you did.

> Isn't it pretty much what any person would do, mash up some related words?

Yes, that’s exactly what chatgpt does, and it’s what many humans do. But to be analogous to your initial example, there should be another person who actually came up with the instruction specifying which words to mash into a poem. The word-masher, whether human or chatgpt, is just following the instructions, not coming up with them.

So kinda like when your English teacher asks you to write a poem about whatever you want? Can't ChatGPT do that as well? There's at least novelty in whatever random content it generates, is there not? Just by having a large enough library you will create a new thing because nobody's been in the jakelope/unicorn area before, or whatever the dice decide. I feel like maybe there's something about this no-novelty argument, but it's not been worded in a convincing way yet.

By this logic, all my farts are novel content.

I just gave chatGPT the prompt "write a poem" and it gave me an original little ditty about nature.

The novelty was not in the prompt.

The point is that it's able to produce content that hasn't been made before, it's not just giving back examples from the training set. It's able to--yes, with instruction--combine concepts logically to produce something new.

If I ask a random person I meet to write a poem with the same instructions as were given above I'd be surprised if they were able to come up with something as good as ChatGPT.

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