Do they "recognize" that they don't know the word, or are there just no statistically plausible surroundings that they can embed a nonsense word into other than settings that usually surround un-tokenizable words?

If you told them to write a Lewis Carroll poem about a nonsense word, it wouldn't have any problem. Not because it "recognizes" the word as being like a nonsense word in a Lewis Carroll poem, but because those poems are filled with other un-tokenizable words that could be replaced with anything.

I'm starting to come to the conclusion that LLMs are Mad-Libs at scale. Which are actually very useful. If there are paragraphs where I can swap out the words for other words, and generate a plausible idea, I can try it out in the real world and it might really work.

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ACCount37 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think there's a direct link to the tokenizer - it's a higher level capability. You can stitch together a nonsense word out of common "word fragment" tokens and see if that impairs the LLM's ability to recognize the word as nonsense.

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Jensson 5 days ago | parent [-]

That is wrong, I just generated 5 random letters in python and sent it to gpt-5 and it totally failed to answer properly, said "Got it, whats up :)" even though what I wrote isn't recognizable at all.

The "capability" you see is for the LLM to recognize its a human typed random string since human typed random strings are not very random. If you send it an actual random word then it typically fails.

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pfg_ 4 days ago | parent [-]

I tried this four times, every time it recognized it as nonsense.

	▲	typpilol 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Same

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thaumasiotes 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> If you told them to write a Lewis Carroll poem about a nonsense word, it wouldn't have any problem.

This makes me wonder something specific.

Let's imagine that we generate poetry "in the style of Lewis Carroll" around a particular nonsense word, one that hasn't been written down before.

Will that poetry treat the word as if it has one consistent pronunciation?

(This question doesn't quite apply to Jabberwocky - Lewis Carroll himself would obviously have passed the test, but he doesn't reuse his nonsense words.)