The same narrow band

There is a reason to keep that question open, and it has nothing to do with machines.

Psychologists have studied how many genuinely different answers a person can produce to an open question, and compared that against how loosely their thinking runs. The relationship is an arc, not a straight line. Thinking a little looser than average, the kind that lets two unrelated ideas touch, produces more. Thinking with almost nothing holding it produces less. As one review of the evidence puts it, too much control hinders creative thought and too little disrupts it.

You can hear both ends of that. Thinking bound too tightly reaches for the expected phrase every time. Thinking with nothing holding it runs from one connection to the next faster than anyone can follow, until it stops being insight and becomes noise (there is a thin line between novelty and nonsense).

Which is the same shape as the dial, reached from somewhere else entirely. Both need some slack before anything unexpected appears. Both fall apart when there is too much of it.

That is a resemblance and not an identity. A person's looseness is held in place by meaning, and by wanting to be understood. The model's is held in place by a number in a settings panel. But it does suggest that whatever separates the two, it is not simply that one of them involves a controlled amount of randomness.