This sort of thing gets repeated often but is a major oversimplification. To see this, one good tactic is to pick three literary works at random from highly different genres and ask the LLM to generate an essay comparing their themes. For example, if I do this with ChatGPT right now with Avatar the Last Airbender, Romeo and Juliet, and 2001: A Space Odyssey here is what we get with no retries:
Exploring Human Struggle, Transformation, and Transcendence in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Romeo and Juliet, and 2001: A Space Odyssey
At first glance, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey seem to share little in common. One is a children’s animated fantasy series, one a canonical tragedy of young love, and the third a cerebral science fiction film. Yet all three grapple with deep philosophical themes concerning human struggle, transformation, and the tension between fate and free will. Each work, in its own medium and idiom, confronts the human desire to transcend limitations—be they societal, personal, or cosmic—and the cost of doing so.
The Struggle Against Inherited Conflict
A central theme uniting all three works is the burden of inherited conflict and the question of whether individuals can break free from the past. In Romeo and Juliet, the titular characters are doomed not because of personal flaws, but because they inherit a centuries-long feud between the Montagues and Capulets. Their love is a brief, desperate attempt to transcend this violent legacy, and their tragic deaths ultimately force their families to confront the senselessness of their hatred.
Similarly, Avatar: The Last Airbender centers on Aang, a child monk who inherits the burden of ending a century-long war waged by the Fire Nation. Aang must grapple with the weight of past decisions and cultural expectations, particularly the violent legacy of Avatar Roku and the genocidal war begun by Fire Lord Sozin. His journey, like that of Romeo and Juliet, hinges on the possibility of breaking a seemingly inescapable cycle of violence.
Even 2001: A Space Odyssey addresses inherited legacy, albeit on a cosmic scale. Humanity's evolution is shaped by mysterious monoliths—symbols of an alien intelligence that interferes with natural development. This “inheritance” propels mankind from primitive apes to spacefarers. The film’s protagonist, Dave Bowman, ultimately confronts the limitations of human understanding and is transformed into the Star Child, signaling a break from biological humanity into a new stage of existence. Like Romeo and Juliet and Aang, he is a vessel through which old paradigms are challenged and transcended.
Transformation and the Self
Transformation, both personal and metaphysical, lies at the heart of each narrative. In Romeo and Juliet, love transforms the characters from impulsive youths to tragic heroes. Romeo evolves from a melancholic lover to someone willing to defy family, law, and fate for Juliet. Their deaths become a transformative act for Verona itself, which moves from division to reconciliation.
In Avatar, personal transformation is more sustained and explicit. Zuko’s arc in particular mirrors a Shakespearean trajectory—he begins as an antagonist and slowly reshapes his identity through inner conflict, betrayal, and ultimately redemption. Aang's transformation is subtler but no less profound, as he learns to integrate his pacifist beliefs with his responsibility as the Avatar. Their journeys show that self-knowledge and moral courage are essential for true transformation.
Kubrick’s 2001 pushes this theme into the abstract. The film tracks the transformation of consciousness—from primitive violence to artificial intelligence (HAL), and finally to post-human transcendence. Dave Bowman’s passage through the Stargate and rebirth as the Star Child is not explained in dialogue but portrayed as a spiritual metamorphosis, echoing both Eastern philosophies of rebirth and Western ideals of enlightenment. His journey is a meditation on the next phase of evolution, contrasting the violent roots of humanity with the potential for transcendence.
Fate, Free Will, and the Human Condition
All three works wrestle with the relationship between fate and free will. Romeo and Juliet often feel like pawns of destiny, with the prologue declaring their “star-crossed” fate. Yet their choices—the secrecy, the haste, the final acts of suicide—suggest a tragic interplay of agency within the constraints of a hostile world. Shakespeare invites the audience to question whether fate is a force or a consequence of human error and societal pressure.
In Avatar, destiny is explicitly addressed. Aang is told he must end the war, and Zuko is told he must capture the Avatar to restore his honor. Yet both characters ultimately defy the roles they were assigned, choosing paths rooted in their evolving moral compass rather than inherited expectations. The series suggests that fate may set the stage, but individuals still write their own lines.
2001 offers perhaps the most enigmatic view of this tension. The deterministic progression from ape to astronaut seems orchestrated by an unseen intelligence, and HAL’s breakdown suggests that even machines cannot escape the flaws of their creators. Yet Dave’s transformation hints at a break in determinism—a leap into the unknown. Whether this is an act of free will or the inevitable next step in an alien-designed experiment remains ambiguous, but it reflects the perennial human desire to seek meaning and purpose beyond material existence.
Conclusion
Though emerging from wildly different contexts—Elizabethan theater, modern animation, and avant-garde cinema—Romeo and Juliet, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and 2001: A Space Odyssey all interrogate the human struggle against inherited limitations, the possibility of transformation, and the complex dance between fate and agency. They remind us that while the stage may be set by history, biology, or even alien forces, what ultimately defines humanity is our capacity to strive, to love, to rebel, and to imagine something greater beyond the known.
Yes, an LLM is a giant collection of vectors. But the ability to construct things like this shouldn't cause you to dismiss the AI as a mere manipulation of vectors. Rather it should cause you to decide that you've underestimated the power of linear algebra.
In the particular case of the sort of hallucination noted by the research in question, there's also a more interesting explanation than mere dismissal: careful reasoning and correction of incorrect ideas on the internet are often longer careful essays. Having to give short explanations pattern matches more to less reliable information in its training data.
