LLMs are the tech in question, not ML (AI?) in general.

LLMs are fundamentally limited by their architecture to only return a token predicted by a statistical inference, essentially lossy decompression.

It's like arguing that taking an image, compressing it with JPEG and low quality, then decompressing it into something blurry with some random color values thrown in is creating new art.

No one is arguing that everything a human has created is good. No one is arguing that LLMs can't be useful.

Sutton is arguing that it can't be novel. Cherry picking a couple of words doesn't change his argument, which is very clear.