Can an AI like ChatGPT produce original content?
It is often said that an AI like ChatGPT can't produce original material or original knowledge. The reason given is that it feeds from already existing material or knowledge that has been already produced.
That doesn't sound right to me. Someone reading about a bizarre crime in a newspaper can come up with an original solution to the mystery. Some software inspecting a table of results can find an original way to compress those values expressing them in a formula.
The interpretation of the existing data can be original. And if the compression formula is worth something, maybe it can extrapolate some new values with some accuracy, and that sounds a lot like generating original material to me.