> I would rate a person who provides no sentence at all as performing significantly better

Why?

> I suspect most people could pretty quickly come up with something

It only takes 60 seconds to test that on yourself. It's not that easy to come up with something of similar length to ChatGPT's answer that also sounds somewhat natural/sensible.

>I would rate a person who provides no sentence at all as performing significantly better

The logic failure in the above statement is probably worse than the logic failure of not being able to spontaneously compose a phrase with just 5-letter words - and slipping in one or two with a higher word-count.

>I suspect most people could pretty quickly come up with something

You'd be very surprised then. Most people fail at even more basic tasks.

Heck, most candidate programmers fail at fizz-buzz (not that more difficult than the above)

I wasn't clear on how was using "better". Your example is better in that it fulfills the requirement, but I don't think it's as impressive as ChatGPT's answer. How long would it take to make a sentence that is at least 7 words (and also making sense, and ideally sounding good)?

"That's" is not one word.

I tried, this is what I came up with under significant time pressure:

Happy books sound great.

It was very difficult to think of a plural verb with 5 letters, and once I realized that was an issue, I was worried that I wouldn't have enough time to come up with a singular noun that would fit any of the singular verbs that I was considering (reads, seems).

Interestingly, this is the exact same mistake that ChatGPT made! It has "spell" -> "spells" which is a plurality / correctness of sentence mistake.

My sentence is technically correct and could be used plausibly in conversation: "What kind of books do you want to read?" "Happy books sound great."

But it's a pretty weak sentence. Being restricted from articles makes it very difficult to get agreement.