He was actually more explicit elsewhere. Lem's book Imaginary Magnitude consists of a collection of prefaces to nonexistent books. One of them is for "Juan Rambellais et al., A History of Bitic Literature, Volume I". The "bitic" literature consists of novels written by, well, language models. You would feed in the combined work of Tolstoy, and out comes a new "Tolstoy" novel.
When I first read this "preface" twenty years ago, the idea seemed implausible to me: How could a system write novels only by being fed other novels, and without simultaneously being a general intelligence? Surely novel writing is AGI-complete!
When I first read this "preface" twenty years ago, the idea seemed implausible to me: How could a system write novels only by being fed other novels, and without simultaneously being a general intelligence? Surely novel writing is AGI-complete!