[bloomca]

All your thoughts are and experiences are real and pretty unique in some ways. However, the circumstances are usually well-defined and expected (our life is generally very standardized), so the responses can be generalized successfully.

You can see it here as well -- discussions under similar topics often touch the same topics again and again, so you can predict what will be discussed when the next similar idea comes to the front page.

[ccppurcell]

So what if we are quite predictable. That doesn't mean we are "trying" to predict the next word, or "trying" to be predictable, which is what llms are doing.

Over a large population, trends emerge. An LLM is not a member of the population, it is a replicator of trends in a population, not a population of souls but of sentences, a corpus.