Temperature is an easy knob to twist, after all. Somebody (not me I’m too poor to pay the lawyers) should do a search and find where the crime starts.
At that point it's retrieving results from a database.
EDIT: how would OP address my main point, which is that det. inference is functionally equivalent to any arbitrary keyed data storage/retrieval system?
This is not true. Fabrice Bellard's ts_zip [0] and ts_sms [1] uses a LLM to compress text. It beats stuff like .xz etc but of course is much slower. Now.. if it were non-deterministic, you would have trouble decompressing exactly into what it compressed. So, it uses a deterministic LLM
[0] https://bellard.org/ts_zip/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152978
[1] https://bellard.org/ts_sms/ https://lobste.rs/s/5srkwz/fabrice_bellard_s_ts_sms_short_me... (funny enough many people comment that, if it uses LLM, it must be lossy. This is not the case. It's compared to xz in the page because it's lossless)
You could take it a step further and have a deterministic agent inside a deterministic VM, and you can share a whole project as {model hash, vm image hash, prompt, source tree hash} and have someone else deterministically reproduce it.
Is this useful? Not sure. One use case I had in mind as a mechanism for distributing "forbidden software". You can't distribute software that violates DMCA, for example, but can you distribute a prompt?