> Why not just prompt GPT-5 to "roleplay" 1913?

Because it will perform token completion driven by weights coming from training data newer than 1913 with no way to turn that off.

It can't be asked to pretend that it wasn't trained on documents that didn't exist in 1913.

The LLM cannot reprogram its own weights to remove the influence of selected materials; that kind of introspection is not there.

Not to mention that many documents are either undated, or carry secondary dates, like the dates of their own creation rather than the creation of the ideas they contain.

Human minds don't have a time stamp on everything they know, either. If I ask someone, "talk to me using nothing but the vocabulary you knew on your fifteenth birthday", they couldn't do it. Either they would comply by using some ridiculously conservative vocabulary of words that a five-year-old would know, or else they will accidentally use words they didn't in fact know at fifteen. For some words you know where you got them from by association with learning events. Others, you don't remember; they are not attached to a time.

Or: solve this problem using nothing but the knowledge and skills you had on January 1st, 2001.

> GPT-5 knows how the story ends

No, it doesn't. It has no concept of story. GPT-5 is built on texts which contain the story ending, and GPT-5 cannot refrain from predicting tokens across those texts due to their imprint in its weights. That's all there is to it.

The LLM doesn't know an ass from a hole in the ground. If there are texts which discuss and distinguish asses from holes in the ground, it can write similar texts, which look like the work of someone learned in the area of asses and holes in the ground. Writing similar texts is not knowing and understanding.

I do agree with this and think it is an important point to stress.

But we don't know how much different/better human (or animal) learning/understanding is, compared to current LLMs; dismissing it as meaningless token prediction might be premature, and underlying mechanisms might be much more similar than we'd like to believe.

If anyone wants to challenge their preconceptions along those lines I can really recommend reading Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology (1984)".

Excuse me sir you forgot to anthropomorphise the language model

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