If you look at their paper, section 4 is entirely devoted to this question. They present compelling evidence that it is generating original content, the simples

If you look at their paper, section 4 is entirely devoted to this question. They present compelling evidence that it is generating original content, the simplest of which is it's ability to write coherently about ridiculous things like talking unicorns that nobody has ever written about in the training set. https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/language_models_are_unsupervised_multitask_learners.pdf https://d4mucfpksywv.cloudfront.net/better-language-models/l...