But GP's argument ("limit the space to text") could be taken to imply - and it seems to be a common implication these days - that LLMs have mastered the text medium, or that they will very soon.
> it can't write a foundational piece of literature
Why not, if this a pure textual medium, the corpus includes all the great stories ever written, and possibly many writing workshops and great literature courses?
So at least we can agree that AI hasn't mastered the text medium, without further qualification?
And what about my argument, further qualified, which is that I don't think it could even write as well as a good professional writer - not necessarily a generational one?
I don't know what this means and I don't know what would qualify it as having "mastered" at all. Seems like a no-true-Scotsman thing where regardless there would always be someone that it couldn't actually do a thing because this and that.
>why can't they write a novel?
This is what I'm disagreeing with. I think an LLM can write a novel well enough that it's recognizably a pretty mediocre novel, no worse than the median written human novel which to be fair is pretty bad. You seem to have an unqualified bar something needs to pass before "writing a novel" is accomplished but it's not clear what that is. At the same time you're switching between the ability to do a thing and the ability to do a thing in a way that's honored as the best of the best for a century. So I don't know it kind of seems like you just don't like AI and have a different standard for it that adjusts so that it fails. This doesn't match what you'd consider some random Bob's ability to do a thing.