> often with no clear winner. You have to pick one somehow. It's not like it's taking some kind of "real" output and obfuscating it.

It’s very rare for multiple outputs to actually be equal so the only choice is to choose one at random. Instead its become accepted practice to make sub optimal choices for a few reasons, one of which really is to decrease the likelihood of reproducing existing text.

Nobody wants a headline like: “Meta's Llama 3.1 can recall 42 percent of the first Harry Potter book” https://www.understandingai.org/p/metas-llama-31-can-recall-...

I will say that picking the most likely word every single time isn't optimal.