Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

I agree with the point but it would've been nicer if it wasn't written by an AI

> But ask it anything and it returns the most probable continuation — the center of mass of everything already written. Trained on the past, it answers in the past tense of thought. Not what is true. What is typical.

The problem is that this is a contradiction, and a pretty common misunderstanding. When we talk about something being probable, we're talking about what we don't know. When you extrapolate, you're saying something about the unknown, you're creating something new. While you can extrapolate into the past or the future, in the way this line is talking, it's answering in a future tense. I think even worse is that beneath this it says

> returned at the speed of certainty

At that point we're no longer talking about probabilities!

The problem isn't that these machines aren't capable of making new things. The whole of their mathematical grounding is in the creation of the unknown from the known. The problem is precisely that they are sold as miracle cures where they can produce great results for little effort. The law of "you get out of it what you put into it" still holds true. Undirected, uninspired usage of these statistical models gets you mediocre at-best results. Without an understanding of the underlying theory and mechanisms of how these models work (it's not just transformers, but any statistical model), driving the whole of the inference chain with maximal control as one might Max/MSP, as well as mastery over the target domain, you will effectively achieve nothing but "slop".

Of course, there's a whole other discussion here, which is that this site seems to be victim to the same grave ignorance that has caused the supposed "crisis of newness" within the arts (which has been talked about for much longer than these models have existed). That's a whole other can of worms, but essentially it's bunk. In modernity we can point to the last century of unending artistic innovation, and panic that this is slowing down, that this is the end of history. In truth, that century is anomalous. It's the most anomalous we've ever recorded, where real material changes were reacted to in real time. The innovations of modernism weren't born because of pretense to being original. It was wholly derived from the changes happening in reality irrespective of the arts, as a result of the industrial revolution, and later the information revolution. The norm in history is centuries of very slow refinement, barely perceptible on the timeline of a generation. Tiny little incremental changes stacked up over a long period of time. Bombastic, revolutionary artistic progress is the anomaly. An unending cacophony of that progress has happened exactly once in the entire history of humanity, as far as we can tell. There is a stupid expectation that the 20th century's breakneck pace was going to last forever. Obviously it wasn't. It was never a sustainable momentum, statistical models or not. People are still in the mindset it's the norm. The languishing over creative bankruptcy is simply the death of this delusional fantasy.

I hear this sentiment repeated a lot, but I've never seen it to be true in practice. My kids' teachers absolutely do nurture creativity, and I don't think our school district is particularly unique.

We truly are reaching the end times when an article criticizing the use of LLM is in itself pure AI slop.

Wouldn't that be the same even if AI wasn't involved? By and large, it's the same books, the same training for students, the same hammered in structure, so the output from students would be reasonably similar. No one is coming up with new allegories out of The Scarlet Letter at this point.