Synthetic training data is carefully crafted by humans. The rare geniuses of human history use a different magnitude and configuration of the same kind of human intelligence that posted a dad joke on a site that got scraped into the training set and repeated, convincing people that it is intelligent like humans.

> that you wouldn't otherwise dismiss as non-intelligent rehashing of the same tired patterns they always inhabit were those same actions attributed to LLMs?

Regardless of whether something's been done before people still come up with them on their own without directly copying or amalgamating several copies. Pretty much every skilled profession includes figuring things out on the fly through the use of general reasoning that doesn't involve pattern matching against millions of examples.