Is Temperature the Creativity Parameter of Large Language Models?

Understand

Large language models (LLMs) are applied to all sorts of creative tasks, and their outputs vary from beautiful, to peculiar, to pastiche, into plain plagiarism.

• The temperature parameter of an LLM regulates the amount of randomness, leading to more diverse outputs; therefore, it is often claimed to be the creativity parameter.
• Here, we investigate this claim using a narrative generation task with a predetermined fixed context, model and prompt.
• Specifically, we present an empirical analysis of the LLM output for different temperature values using four necessary conditions for creativity in narrative generation: novelty, typicality, cohesion, and coherence.