alt Hacker News> I'm afraid, the essence is that is not. Re-sequencing content is not the same as synthesis
Drawing different sources of information together into a single understanding is quite literally the definition of "synthesis" in this context. If that process is what you're referring to as "re-sequencing content", then it does fit the definition of "synthesis" in this discussion.
If you're using the phrase "re-sequencing content" as a way of indirectly suggesting that LLMs aren't relating together multiple sources of information and combining them into a single expression, then that itself is the point of contention that we are arguing about.
Perhaps you're trying to apply a philosophical concept of synthesis, e.g. that of Fichte or Hegel, but that definition applies to a specific type of philosophical analysis, and isn't quite the concept we're using in this discussion.
If we're talking about concepts and communication, in text, I don't know what meaning of synthesis to apply (as long as there is meaning), other than the meaning this has had for centuries. I think, aggregation, extraction and emulgating is something else.
The very purpose of text is to transfer meaning, concepts, observations and complex thoughts to human readers for them to process. And we have built a complex framework around this and for this. The fact that many feel that this framework is violated should hint at there being a problem, a conceptual discrepancy. (And be it just that there's a man-in-the middle, who hasn't authorship, standing in between me as an author and those receiving what remains of the text. In its essential lack of agency, it's less of a mediating recommendation and more of an appropriation. But, maybe, if we're talking about a slip into a new dogmatic slumber, manufactured via an unseen authority that hasn't any authority nor position as an author, the problem goes deeper than this. And, maybe, the masquerading of LLM output as human cummunication and phrasing is part of the problem.)