They're trained on all of human history, and the OP is asking for their take on humanity. How is that not interesting?
Training itself doesn't directly produce synthesis, -- it creates reproduction. Generalization during the process can result in novel output, but that can go either way as nothing selects for insight vs hallucination.
Models are also trained on synthetic material (as opposed to your 'human history'), which may result in fixating novel concepts and not just reproduction. But there is no particular reason to expect any reliable insights from the way this is done outside of the domain of machine verifiable objective results.
For this kind of "your take on X" one shots-- the model is almost certainly regurgitating some bias from training.
It's really easy to come up with an opinion-shaped sentence, that doesn't mean any actual reasoning has gone into it. It's just a pundit-shaped sentence, something someone might say at a party. It's a maximally bland "controversial" opinion about humanity.
Not really… their training datasets strongly skew towards the contemporary West; LLM training data isn’t representative of the contemporary global average, let alone the historical global average.
As well as the skew of the raw training data, RLHF further skews it—a lot of the beliefs of the average 2026 human being (who belongs to the global South) are likely unsafe/misinformation/etc when judged by the standards of the AI vendors.
I think we like to pretend that we don't. But even if you think about it from a bio/physics point of view, all we are is just a bunch of biological wires and neurotransmitter packages.
I know there's the whole unproven quantum tubule nonsense but even that would be a physics effect that we could learn about, manipulate and extort just as we have with everything else we've learnt about our realities.
Even if it's a simulacrum, it's a simulacrum based on nearly everything that was ever written. No one who has ever lived can claim to know what these models have trained on.
It is a simulacrum, the end.
Maybe it can produce interesting insights. But it's like asking a pundit for a soundbite: what are the odds they aren't just shuffling together something that sounds appropriate to the question?
No it doesn't suggest that. A random number generator can also produce original insight (with different efficiency and effectiveness)
> They can absolutely have takes.
Sure, if you're willing to redefine "take"
You can't prove negative; but it doesn't satisfy any conditions for a positive