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The AI booster argument that "oh well, human writers are also influenced by other writers" is both insanely dumb and insanely insulting; kind of thing that should get you branded for life as a dolt.

LLMs are token-processing engines. *all they do* is take in tokenized input and spit out output. I say "input and output" because it's not even *language,* the *language* can only happen through human interpretation of those inputs and outputs, externally to the model.

Even if you're a delusional LLM-consciousness maximalist you have to concede that an LLM exists purely in a world of language. A human writer has a huge continuum of experiences that are *inaccessible through the pure ingestion of language-like symbols.*

That should be a very obvious and evident thing to observe! A human writer is not sourcing the entirety of what goes into their writing from other writing that they've read.

And furthermore, when we talk about writers being "influenced" by the work of other writers, we are describing a process that is in no way analogous to generative model training, and to suggest that it is is just shows that you don't know piss about the subject matter here.

Literary influence is a dynamic process. It's something you *undergo,* as a conscious being with a continuous sense of self, which resonates from the reading of texts, through to other disparate experiences, and into the production of texts.

An LLM cannot be said to be "influenced" by a text any more that the blueberries "influenced" my morning smoothie. It just has the text in its dataset.

You have to be just a complete dumbass who engages in the most rudimentary category errors to say shit like this. You have to have a model of how people think that is so grossly simplistic that you think a person reading a book and my computer gzipping a text file is the same thing.