alt Hacker NewsLOL. Tolkien invented multiple languages. There are/were probably 100 000 languages on this planet. That's without including dialects.
We use existing languages not because we love to copy, it's because languages are a medium for communication. They're only useful if they're understood by others.
If you wanted to prove a point: writing is much, much harder to invent, yet it was invented independently at least 3 times in history. By definition LLMs can't invent something truly novel like writing. Because nobody trained the first writers. There was no "training set".
It's fine, LLMs can still be useful. Science is looking at the gaps and most of the gaps that are useful are small and LLMs can explore those faster than us. That could potentially improve many lives. Though not in this corporate LLM world, most likely.
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I remember a report a few years back that LLM's(?) started communicating between each other using an internal language, shortcutting most of their serialization. That is language.
I don't think the invention of writing is as awe-inspiring as presented or as difficult/impossible for an LLM to achieve as is commonly believed. The invention of writing was a long series of micro-improvements over common every day things. Let's keep track of count by writing a line in the sand. Let's cut it into a tree. Let's push the line into clay. Let's use two lines touching. These are the kinds of things an LLM can also reason through and achieve.
I reject this idea that an LLM couldn't come up with something novel that isn't in the training data. We know it can come up with sentences that aren't in there. We know it can come up with mathematic proofs that aren't in there. So could it feasibly create something as fundamental as writing or language? Would we even be able to understand what it had done, or would it be so foreign to us that we wouldn't even realize?
Those early writers did have a training set of human knowledge that led them to pushing stones into clay. And our agents may very well have a set of knowledge that leads it to pushing their proverbial stone into their proverbial clay too.
1. Languages are used for much, much more than communication, and there is good reason to think that capacity didn't evolve for communication, but rather for metacognitive problem solving.
2. The idea that Tolkein --one of the most reknowned writers in our entire canon-- did something isn't relevant to the philosophical discussion of creativity and its obvious bounds. Even Tolkein was just painting within the lines set by the linguists he had read and the obscure languages he adored, not to mention the fundamental limits set by our capacity for language in the first place.
For anyone who's curious about this kind of thing, I cannot reccomend the infamous debate b/w Chomsky & Foucault enough; it ranges across topics a bit, but chapter markers should help you skip to the core of it (creativity) if you prefer. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8 , some old summaries on /r/AskPhilosophy here: https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/vgz1vb/what_...
Are you saying your bar for being impressed by an LLM is something equivalent to the initial invention of writing?