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The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

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Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#21

Post by dpe82 »

whiplash451 wrote: post #9
thw_9a83c wrote: post #5

From many perspectives, the creativity of AI is hugely overrated. If AI were so capable of creating original, innovative content then asking the same question all over again would produce an endless list of very unique outputs. But this is not the case; quite often, it's a shocking opposite. Just give AI image generators the same prompt and observe how the output varies. The same goes for LLMs and coding questions (w…

I't even worse than this. If you ask recent AIs the same question all over again, you might get different answers (with some degree of diversity). But none of them is novel to human kind. It's novel to you, but not to our species. AI is nailing us to the manifold that we created at the first place.

Is that really a problem though? Almost nobody does anything "novel to humankind" - besides the odd research professor here and there, we're all just remixing existing stuff in new-to-us ways.

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#22

Post by smartmic »

b00ty4breakfast wrote: post #15

homogeneity is exactly what the industrial milieu is best suited towards, is it any wonder?

I would offer another perspective: homogeneity is one of the greatest catalysts for capitalism (in all its forms: surveillance, finance and suppression). Therefore, shaping it is within the remit of big tech.

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#23

Post by jdietrich »

luxcem wrote: post #2

From [1], I asked a few students to read aloud the titles of some essays they’d submitted that morning. For homework, I had asked them to use AI to propose a topic for the midterm essay. Most students had reported that the AI-generated essay topics were fine, even good. Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen…

This isn't an inherent property of LLMs, it's something they have been specifically trained to do. The vast majority of users want safe, bland, derivative results for the vast majority of prompts. It isn't particularly difficult to coax an LLM into giving batshit insane responses, but that wouldn't be a sensible default for a chatbot.

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#24

Post by justonceokay »

padolsey wrote: post #20

Because it's fun, I'd like to pose the contrary position that AI will actually make us more different. Perhaps dangerously so. Many people don't understand the nature of LLMs nor how rabbit-hole-y a long context will necessarily become. And so as they talk to it, they move slowly further away from its corpus and towards a private shared meme-space, where they can have in-jokes and private moments never reconciled wit…

Most people aren’t conversing with the AI they just use it as Google 2.0

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#25

Post by andrepd »

raincole wrote: post #12
luxcem wrote: post #2

From [1], I asked a few students to read aloud the titles of some essays they’d submitted that morning. For homework, I had asked them to use AI to propose a topic for the midterm essay. Most students had reported that the AI-generated essay topics were fine, even good. Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen…

If these topics are word salad, colleges might have been training word saucier chefs way before GPT-2 became a thing.

It's not just that it's word salad, it's also that it's exactly the same. There's a multi-trillion dollar attempt to replace your individuality with bland amorphous slop """content""". This doesn't bother you in the slightest?

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#26

Post by andrepd »

yantrams wrote: post #16

Here's something I made using AI about this. Came from a conversation I had with a Redditor couple of years ago. https://jumpshare.com/share/BXUFsIxvjPPCTyEjgly3

I don't get the point. I agree with the text, but what do the images mean?

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#27

Post by Antibabelic »

jdietrich wrote: post #23
luxcem wrote: post #2

From [1], I asked a few students to read aloud the titles of some essays they’d submitted that morning. For homework, I had asked them to use AI to propose a topic for the midterm essay. Most students had reported that the AI-generated essay topics were fine, even good. Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen…

This isn't an inherent property of LLMs, it's something they have been specifically trained to do. The vast majority of users want safe, bland, derivative results for the vast majority of prompts. It isn't particularly difficult to coax an LLM into giving batshit insane responses, but that wouldn't be a sensible default for a chatbot.

Are you sure? Yes, LLMs can be irrelevant and incoherent. But people seem to produce results that are more variable even when staying relevant and coherent (and "uncreative").

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#28

Post by Antibabelic »

padolsey wrote: post #20

Because it's fun, I'd like to pose the contrary position that AI will actually make us more different. Perhaps dangerously so. Many people don't understand the nature of LLMs nor how rabbit-hole-y a long context will necessarily become. And so as they talk to it, they move slowly further away from its corpus and towards a private shared meme-space, where they can have in-jokes and private moments never reconciled wit…

We still share a baseline reality. This is how people who are stranded in places with unfamiliar languages and cultures are still able to build bridges.

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#29

Post by whiplash451 »

dpe82 wrote: post #21
whiplash451 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I't even worse than this. If you ask recent AIs the same question all over again, you might get different answers (with some degree of diversity). But none of them is novel to human kind. It's novel to you, but not to our species. AI is nailing us to the manifold that we created at the first place.

Is that really a problem though? Almost nobody does anything "novel to humankind" - besides the odd research professor here and there, we're all just remixing existing stuff in new-to-us ways.

The "odd research professor here and there" invented vaccine and quantum mechanics and discovered radioactivity.

None of them would have achieved that with the help of a machine telling them "you're absolutely right!" whenever they'd be asking deep questions to it.

Re: The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

#30

Post by Antibabelic »

thw_9a83c wrote: post #5

From many perspectives, the creativity of AI is hugely overrated. If AI were so capable of creating original, innovative content then asking the same question all over again would produce an endless list of very unique outputs. But this is not the case; quite often, it's a shocking opposite. Just give AI image generators the same prompt and observe how the output varies. The same goes for LLMs and coding questions (w…

I'm not one to usually defend AI, but if I understand you correctly, humans also fail your criteria for being capable of creating original, innovative content. If you ask people the same question over and over again, I imagine the variability in the responses you'll get will be quite limited. Tell me if I'm misunderstanding your thought.
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