alt Hacker News> An interesting thought experiment is whether it's possible that AI tools could write a novel that's better than War and Peace. A quick google shows a lot of (poorly written) articles about how "AI is just a machine, so it can never be creative," which strikes me as a weak argument way too focused on a physical detail instead of the result. War and Peace and/or other great novels are certainly in the training set of some or all models, and there is some real consensus about which ones are great, not just random subjective opinions.
I am sure it could but then what is the point? Consider this, lets assume that someone did manage to use LLM to produce a very well written novel. Would you rather have the novel that the LLM generated (the output), or the prompts and process that lead to that novel?
The moment I know how its made, the exact prompts and process, I can then have an infinite number of said great novels in 1000 different variations. To me this makes the output way, way less valuable compared to the input. If great novels are cheap to produce, they are no longer novel and becomes the norm, expectation rises and we will be looking for something new.
I'm inclined to believe that the difference that makes the upper bound of human writing (or creativity) higher than that of an LLM comes from having experiences in the real world. When someone is "inspired" by others' work or is otherwise deriving ideas from them, they inevitably and unavoidably insert their own biases and experiences into their own work, i.e. they also derive from real-world processes. An LLM, however, is derived directly and entirely from others' work, and cannot be influenced by the real world, only a projection of it.
> Would you rather have the novel that the LLM generated (the output), or the prompts and process that lead to that novel?
The "process", in many cases, is not necessarily preferable to the novel. Because an important part of the creative process is real-world experiences (as described above), and the real world is often unpleasant, hard, and complex, I'd often prefer a novel over the source material. Reading Animal Farm is much less unpleasant than being caught in the Spanish Civil War, for example.