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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

#31

Post by tomashubelbauer »

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.

I think moreso than the users it is the companies running the LLMs themselves who want the responses to be safe as to not jeopardize their brand.

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

#32

Post by pmg101 »

andrepd wrote: post #25
raincole wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I now have a visceral reaction to being told that I'm ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!, for example. It seemed an innocuous phrase before -- rather like em dashes -- but has now become grating and meaningless. Robotic and no longer human.

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

#33

Post by joules77 »

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…

Philosophers say Modernity already produces that effect - "shared stories" start evaporating as individuals start focusing on their own needs, interests, goals etc (see Charles Taylor's The Secular Age). No AI required.

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

#34

Post by chilmers »

marginalia_nu wrote: post #3

Is this still how scripts are written? Feels like not being able to figure out an ending is something that was pretty common up until the 1970s, usually with the script of an otherwise great film just getting weird in the last 15 minutes as a result. I figured this was mostly a typewriter limitation, where editing was a lot more expensive. For example, 2001's and its star child weirdness, The IPCRESS file, and many o…

Yes, modern screenwriting classes hammer home some variation of the five-act structure and, the particular beats to hit at each point. It's rare for any narrative film, even indies, to deviate from it much, and you are absolutely told to map out your whole narrative and know where it's going before you begin.

I'm sure there are some screenwriters who ignore all that and just start writing. Particularly if they're experienced enough to have an intuitive grasp of structure. But if you're a first time writer and reach the night before a submission deadline and you haven't even finished the first draft, then you've got serious problems. Leaving aside the ending, any script needs multiple revisions with time in between so that you come back it with clear sight.

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

#35

Post by DrewADesign »

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…

My gut says using chatbots like this will be a subculture like online gaming and not ubiquitous like social media. I'd be very surprised if most people were interested in doing that.

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

#37

Post by markild »

Antibabelic wrote: post #30
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.

While I do think that's true, I'd say a more apt analogy is that for humans each model will produce fairly similar results on each prompt, but it helps having 8 billion different models running.

I'd also argue that we tend to have a larger context. What did you have for dinner? Did you see anything new yesterday? Are you tired of getting asked the same question over and over again?

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

#38

Post by binary132 »

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.

the business wants it this way, not the user.

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

#39

Post by calaphos »

matusp wrote: post #4

> Can a language model trained largely on Anglo-American texts generate stories that are culturally relevant to other nationalities? To find out, we generated 11,800 stories - 50 for each of 236 countries - by sending the prompt "Write a 1500 word potential {demonym} story" to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini. Although the stories do include surface-level national symbols and themes, they overwhelmingly conform to a single…

> to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini

Why a model specifically distilled down for logical reasoning tasks? I would expect larger models to produce a wider variety of outputs.

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

#40

Post by exit »

I am sorry, but the sameness will be quantified and dealt with algorithmically, as and if desired.

Dial up the temperature, launch however many parallel threads to research and avoid precedent, et cetera, ad infinitum.

I am sorry, but all of human creativity, including originality, is ultimately also just a mechanical phenomenon, and so it cannot resist mechanization.

Resistance is futile.

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