Why do people keep repeating this falsehood? Is it wishful thinking, or a genuine technical misunderstanding, or intentional disinformation?

LLMs absolutely can create novel syntheses. It’s very easy to test this yourself. From creating sentences that do not appear in Google to creating unique story outlines, it’s super easy to prove this wrong.

I think it's a matter of perception. There's regurgitation. There's recombination. There's advanced recombination through layers of prestidigitation. And then there's actual human creativity, which you might deny is special, leaving us at an impasse because we can't provide you with a tool to measure it with. It just comes down to a philosophical face off, high noon with hand-waving instead of six-guns.

But anyway the point is that LLMs produce a lot of novel stuff that we feel already tired of because it seems like we've seen it before.