In so doing, it's less than Gatsby and way less than Fitzgerald. There is nothing here in this 'epilogue'."This Commodore 64 is useless. It can't even run Crysis."
Snark aside, I didn't ask if the epilogue was any good or not, I asked where it came from. It came from our collective consciousness as embedded in the language model. It turns out that what we've been dismissing as mere "language" is an insanely powerful thing, maybe the only thing.
We're still in the first publicly-visible generation of LLM technology, and the model that generated the epilogue was already behind the leading edge in many respects. Anyone who's not blown away by this is whistling past the graveyard. Computers are now doing what we do. Yes, they still kinda suck at it. But they will get better at it much faster than we will.
I mean, really. What is a human author thinking, if not, "What would feel nice here? OK, now what seems like it would go with this sort of thing? OK, something else, let's have more, what kind of concepts go here? What do people normally say when they talk in this way?" It's been understood since the Greek classical period that there is only a finite amount of ore in the original-story mine. Everything after the first seven or so basic ideas is just implementation.
I have to wonder what you'd think of Anthony Burgess's epilogue to A Clockwork Orange, the one that the book's American publisher and Kubrick both chose to leave on the proverbial cutting-room floor. The one where Alex grew out of his rebel phase, got a job, and started a family. This epilogue reminds me of that, somehow. I could easily see Burgess's final chapter emerging fully-formed from an LLM in the not-too-distant future.