I think you're right. I would go a step further and say that all learning is roughly synonymous with reducing the output space, and that humans do the exact same thing. There are more ways to get the wrong answer to a math problem than there are to get the right answer. When you learn someone's name, you're narrowing your output to be a single name rather than all plausible names.

The output of a generative model is practically infinite. I suspect it's possible to continually narrow the space of completions and never converge on a single output. If this turns out to be true, it would bode well for the scalability of few-shot learning.