Only you, a human developer can be truly creative. An LLM can only ever reproduce what it has seen before.
An LLM can only ever reproduce what it has seen before.
How is that in ANY WAY an epilogue to The Great Gatsby? This is exactly the problem. That original story builds with a series of revelations into the conclusion 'so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into our past': establishing a PURPOSE, perhaps a bleak and unwelcome one. Fitzgerald's revealing an insight into the delusions of humanity. He's picturing even the greatest of us as surfers on the river of nihilism and reality. Our aspirations sparkle prettily… and are gone, like froth in the rapids.
And this is just a little bit beautiful. We can imagine beyond our reach. That's a human thing. The fact that our minds can cling so longingly to something that is simply not real, is kind of wonderful. Everyone's their own little world of unreality, and we aspire so earnestly (much like these AI folks do).
And then the AI, having drunk up all of Fitzgerald and everybody else, 'continues' past the point. With what? Hardly matters. It has no point to make. I'd be impressed if it refused, said 'nope, that was where it ended. Can't add anything worth adding, try reading it again'. But no, because the LLM has no intention and doesn't successfully get one from what it's 'read'.
It's constructed an epilogue out of nebulous religious feelgoodism in the rough style of Fitzgerald's sentence construction, and undermined the whole conclusion of the story… and not maliciously, for that would require intent. Nope… it sort of ambled on, going 'what would feel nice here? ok, now what seems like it would go with this sort of thing? ok, something else, let's have more, what kind of concepts go here? what do people normally say when they talk in this way?'
In so doing, it's less than Gatsby and way less than Fitzgerald. There is nothing here in this 'epilogue'.
GPT4 criticised the 'epilogue', in a rather fascinating way! https://pastebin.com/B0zxbvNv
It successfully works out some of the problems with the first AI's writing, and yet it too fails to get the idea expressed by Fitzgerald, and rather than pivot to religious feelgoodism, it pressures the first AI to instead emphasize how its narrator and Gatsby shared a special bond, the very special specialness of being "the only one who understood what it meant to be young and restless in this restless world."
A lot of people can write that idea, and in fact a lot of people did and that's why GPT4 found it a probable argument to make.
Fitzgerald gave us a moment of viscerally grokking that it doesn't mean s*t… and yet, we will still paddle against the current of time and decay and collapse, because what else can we do? Tomorrow we'll get it. Tomorrow we'll really understand and it'll all make sense.
And so…
"This Commodore 64 is useless. It can't even run Crysis."
Snark aside, I didn't ask if the epilogue was any good or not, I asked where it came from. It came from our collective consciousness as embedded in the language model. It turns out that what we've been dismissing as mere "language" is an insanely powerful thing, maybe the only thing.
We're still in the first publicly-visible generation of LLM technology, and the model that generated the epilogue was already behind the leading edge in many respects. Anyone who's not blown away by this is whistling past the graveyard. Computers are now doing what we do. Yes, they still kinda suck at it. But they will get better at it much faster than we will.
I mean, really. What is a human author thinking, if not, "What would feel nice here? OK, now what seems like it would go with this sort of thing? OK, something else, let's have more, what kind of concepts go here? What do people normally say when they talk in this way?" It's been understood since the Greek classical period that there is only a finite amount of ore in the original-story mine. Everything after the first seven or so basic ideas is just implementation.
I have to wonder what you'd think of Anthony Burgess's epilogue to A Clockwork Orange, the one that the book's American publisher and Kubrick both chose to leave on the proverbial cutting-room floor. The one where Alex grew out of his rebel phase, got a job, and started a family. This epilogue reminds me of that, somehow. I could easily see Burgess's final chapter emerging fully-formed from an LLM in the not-too-distant future.
Anyone who's played around with these models know that at least some generalization is taking place.
Humans don't come up with ideas out of nowhere. Open a novel and you will find that even though the overall work is unique, it is composed of tropes from other literature and experiences from the author's life which have been generalized into another context.