As a human, I have many stupid and wrong ideas all day long - most of those don't bubble up to my conscious awareness. If LLMs hallucinate and come up with crazy things, maybe that's ok given that we can filter out the sensible and novel ones.
I bet your stupid ideas also taught you a valuable lesson and you learned at least something from the experience, maybe your next idea won’t be so dumb, and those 100 watt hours weren’t actually wasted (though it may feel like they were). Compered to a failed LLM experiment, where all those billions of billions of computations are completely wasted. the model knows exactly as much after a failed experiment as it did going into it. Those Megawatt hours were simply wasted, turned into heat energy, paid for by raising the power bills of the of the datacenter’s neighbors.
I'm sorry to nitpick, but isn't an unconscious idea an oxymoron?
Unless you’re defining an idea as something that only exists in your conscious awareness?