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I don't know about this. If what you're saying is true, strictly speaking, novel thought would be impossible. I think the whole game of thinking is picking a set of existing words and concepts you inherit and independently reasoning through/with them to arrive at novel or useful conclusions. The "thinking for yourself" part is all the thinking that goes on in the gap between the existing ideas and the reasoned conclusions you synthesize with them.

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The irony, I was coming to write this very comment. But simply said, it's a logical idea.

In a world of a million concepts, there are a trillion of possible directed associations between pairs of them, and each of them may be multi-valued. Say, what's a real-world relation between "ChatGPT" and "nighmare"? A good thinker will be able to find or come up with many that nobody has seen before, beyond the ones which, due to our 'social prior', are evident. What happens when instead of two, there are three or four concepts?

I would go further and say that parroting is often more complicated than being creative, you have to find those ideas to rehash first, and then rank them by popularity and efficacy at your goal, e.g. publicity or acceptance. In other words, you need to be able to "read the room", or "compute the social prior".

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