Introduction: Moments of Enlightenment Chiang gives an example involving the phenomenon of losing a sock in the dryer and the U.S. Constitution. ChatGPT knows about both of these things, so it can use its knowledge to create a new thing, a text about the first in the style of the second: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one to separate his garments from their mates, in order to maintain the cleanliness and order thereof. . . .” Not bad, as far as it goes. But since ChatGPT exists as a merely approximate picture of the web, Chiang argues, it is (in addi- tion to being inherently fact-challenged) quite limited as a cre- ative force. Instead of creating something truly new, it can only “repackage information that’s already available.” As illuminating as I found Chiang’s essay, I believe his central “jpeg of the Web” metaphor underplays LLMs’ syn- thetic powers. First, I’d argue that repackaging available information actually describes an enormous share of human innovation, artistic or otherwise. More importantly, though, LLMs actually have and use funda- mentally new powers of knowledge organization. While the web now contains an unfathomable amount of infor- mation, much of it is siloed into billions of individual pages. For example, think of questions like these: Who is the tallest NFL running back to win the MVP award? What cities with more than one million residents have had female mayors? Who was the oldest James Bond? 17