LLMs Turn Every Question Into an Answer

This is the second in a five-part series I’m writing about redefining human creativity in the age of AI. Read my first piece about language models as text compressors, and my prequel about how LLMs work.

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You can’t get energy for free. It can be neither created nor destroyed, just moved around. That's more or less what computers were able to do with text on their own for a long time. Barring a disk failure, text was always conserved, often moved around, sometimes crudely transformed. 

But they almost never created it. Other than doing a spell check, if you were seeing text on a computer, it was probably because some human, somewhere, had typed it.

Language models changed this entirely. 

Now, you and I can type a few sentences into ChatGPT and watch it expand, character by character, line by line, into something new—composed out of thin air, just for you. Language models take your text and stretch it into a different shape, like glass heated and blown through a tube. 

What had previously been an inert collection of bits—a line of characters extending across a screen—is now something different, something potentially alive. When you feed a piece of text to a language model, the text is like an acorn turning into a tree. The acorn itself contains instructions for the tree it will become, and the language model becomes rich dirt, water, and warm summer sun.

In short, language models are free energy for text. Let’s talk about how we can use that function for creative purposes.

A world where every question contains an answer

Language models create a world where every question can be expanded into an answer. 

This is critical for creativity because asking questions is a uniquely human thing to do.