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Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

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Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#12
One can casually observe that LLMs quite excel at composition though: gluing together pieces of knowledge in ways no one did before (examples: a program that does X using language Y, a painting that mashes up two themes).

Most knowledge workers' activities aren't innovative or imitational - similarly, we compose stuff, so LLMs are a fair competitor.

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#13
The innovation test they use relies heavily on reasoning, something that the stock LLMs tested are known to be deficient in. Adding reasoning to large language models is an active research area (see e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10403).

Link to actual paper FTA: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17456916231201401

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#14
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI systems are not like people.

People collectively can act like systems.

But can systems act like human beings? People calling an LLM an AI say so, but I doubt it.

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#15
Even their imitation is just superficial, at least for the prompts the average user is motivated to write.

I might not be able to differentiate AI content from any human content, but I can differentiate it from high quality human content.

Which is a bit sad, since AI will probably eliminate most lower end content creation jobs. This doesn't improve the state of the content industry for users, but saves companies quite some money...

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#16
post #12

One can casually observe that LLMs quite excel at composition though: gluing together pieces of knowledge in ways no one did before (examples: a program that does X using language Y, a painting that mashes up two themes). Most knowledge workers' activities aren't innovative or imitational - similarly, we compose stuff, so LLMs are a fair competitor.

... and our judgments of composition favor recall over precision. Which is to say that as human judges we're good at finding sense in something generated if it's plausible. We'll take a proposition (eg in a composition) and construct a justification for it. "I can see how that makes sense". I am conflating plausible combination with high recall. Precision, in this sense, is that no proposition would be acceptable without evidence or precedent. With all precision, no new idea is ok. So a "knob" for recall vs precision on a generative system would nice. Is "temperature" that knob?

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#17
post #15

Even their imitation is just superficial, at least for the prompts the average user is motivated to write. I might not be able to differentiate AI content from any human content, but I can differentiate it from high quality human content. Which is a bit sad, since AI will probably eliminate most lower end content creation jobs. This doesn't improve the state of the content industry for users, but saves companies quit…

>but saves companies quite some money

That's all that matters to companies.

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#19

> Artificial intelligence systems found to Excel at imitation, but not innovation And they do it using the Microsoft spreadsheet software?

Is this one of those quirky HN automatic title edits or was this just a typo from the post author?

Re: Artificial intelligence systems found to excel at imitation, but not innovation

#20
post #15

Even their imitation is just superficial, at least for the prompts the average user is motivated to write. I might not be able to differentiate AI content from any human content, but I can differentiate it from high quality human content. Which is a bit sad, since AI will probably eliminate most lower end content creation jobs. This doesn't improve the state of the content industry for users, but saves companies quit…

>but saves companies quite some money That's all that matters to companies.

Until they can't find seniors anymore.
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