I’ve been thinking a lot about taste and creativity as the next frontier for LLMs. Those who have experimented enough with them know that the content they produce is generally pretty dull—it misses the spark of novelty and creativity. It’s difficult to explain, but one could say it lacks soul.

But how could we infuse soul into LLMs? We could probably prompt them to be opinionated in a specific direction, but how can we train them to have taste? The kind of taste that’s difficult to explain in a prompt. The kind of taste that seems irrational, random, and rooted in feelings. The kind of taste that takes you in a strange aesthetic direction—one that makes perfect sense emotionally. How can you make a machine feel joy, peace, or sorrow when contemplating a piece of art?

Feelings. Perhaps the key to this puzzle. I’d dare to say that without feelings, there is no real creativity. Feelings allow us to develop a sensitivity and appreciation for beautiful things, which in turn help us combine and create new beautiful things in a way that feels right. And it seems to me that, to acquire this intuition, one would need a lifetime of diverse experiences—a first love, a heartbreak, the need to belong, friendships, deceptions, misfortunes.

Perhaps the only way would be to simula… Fuck!