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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

#41

Post by mcv »

amenhotep wrote: post #7
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…

That's a cute story. I asked ChatGPT to suggest "a topic for a midterm essay that addresses our relationship to technology", since that was all the information he gave us. It came up with: The Double-Edged Sword: How Technology Both Enhances and Erodes Human Connection The Illusion of Control: How Technology Shapes Our Perception of Autonomy From Cyberspace to Real Space: The Impact of Virtual Reality on Identity and…

I think he picked the most similar ones out of all the submissions from the entire class. But also, if you generate a list, maybe the AI ensures some diversity in that list, but if every student generates the same list, that still shows a lack of originality.

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

#42

Post by Antibabelic »

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.

There's a deliberateness to human creativity that goes beyond simply "remixing existing stuff", even if it's a significant part of it. Think about how you'd write a piece of software. The process behind writing a book or making a painting isn't fundamentally dissimilar. There's a reason why people use the word "derivative" pejoratively.

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

#43

Post by TeMPOraL »

calaphos wrote: post #39
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.

That, plus the quoted text basically says the model homed in on the monomyth (Hero's journey) structure; while the pattern was identified and named by a 20th century American writer, the pattern itself is common and as ancient as it gets. Wouldn't really call it anglo-american bias.

The monomyth is also writing 101 these days, and considered the default structure you can and should use if you have little experience writing stories, so naturally it'll be a high-probability result of an LLM prompted to write a story - especially prompted in a way that implies the user is inexperienced at writing and needs a result suitable for an inexperienced writer.

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

#44

Post by throwbway37383 »

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.

You say you don't usually defend LLMs, and then give a defense of LLMs based on a giant misreading of what is absolutely standard human behaviour.

In my local library recently, they'd two boards in the lobby as you entered, one with all the drawings created by one class of ~7 year olds based on some book they read, and a second the same idea but the next class up on some other book. Both classes had apparently been asked to do a drawing that illustrated something they liked or thought about the book.

It was absolutely hilarious, and wild, and some genuinely exquisite ones. Some had writing, some didn't. Some had crazy absolutely nonsensical twists and turns in the writing, others more crazy art stuff going on. There were a few tropes that repeated in some of the lazier ones, but even those weren't all the same thing, the way LLM output consistently is, with few exceptions, if any.

And then there were a good number of the ones by the kids which were shockingly inventive, you'd be scratching your head going, geez, how did they come up with that. My partner and I stayed for 10 minutes, and kept noticing some new detail in another of them, and being amazed.

So the reality is the upside-down version of what you're saying.

I recognise that this is just an anecdote on the internet, but surely you know this to be true, variants on the experiment are done in classrooms around the world every day. So may I insist, that the work produced by children, at least, does not fit your odd view of human beings.

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

#45

Post by jovial_cavalier »

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…

I don't get this in the comic either: Why are you devastated that the idea you copied word-for-word is unoriginal? I don't understand what they expected.

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

#46

Post by cantor_S_drug »

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?

This is the default setting. The true test would be if LLMs CAN'T produce distinct outputs. I think this problem can be solved by prompt engineering. Has anyone tried this with Kimi K2?

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

#47

Post by jvanderbot »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #45
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…

I don't get this in the comic either: Why are you devastated that the idea you copied word-for-word is unoriginal? I don't understand what they expected.

If it seems obvious from where you are, then the target audience must not be where you are. In particular young students definitely lack context to critique and a big anonymous sampling like this is a great exercise.

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

#48

Post by flir »

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?

For what most of us are using it for (generating code), that's not a bad outcome. This audience might have less of a problem with it than the general population.

Whether we have the discipline to limit our use of the tool to its strengths... well, I doubt it. Just look at how social media turned out.

(Idle thought: I wonder if a model fine-tuned on one specific author would give more "original" titles).

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

#49

Post by cantor_S_drug »

I have opposite version of this problem.

Is it possible for AI to learn so much about myself that it will be more me than me myself?

An AI could potentially accumulate detailed information about your behaviors, preferences, communication patterns, and decision-making tendencies - perhaps even more comprehensive data than you consciously remember about yourself. It might predict your responses or model your thinking patterns with impressive accuracy. An AI might become very good at simulating aspects of "you" - perhaps even better than you are at articulating your own patterns.

It could create high probability "coherent action paths" of what I might do in future given current context. Then matching my initial choices to see which action path I am on, it could in theory "predict" my choices further down the line. Similar to how we play chess.

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

#50

Post by TeMPOraL »

whiplash451 wrote: post #29
dpe82 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Where "invented" really means "had the right set of skills, knowledge and experience, and was paying attention at the exact right moment when all the pieces of the puzzle were collected together on the table".

Scientific and technological progress is inherently incremental. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication and specialization to spot the pieces ready to be connected - but the final act of putting them together is relatively simple, and most importantly, it requires all the puzzles to be there.

Which is why, historically, ~all scientific discoveries have been made by multiple researchers (or teams) independently, at roughly the same time - until all prerequisites are made, the next step is ~impossible, but the moment all are met, it becomes almost obvious to those in the know.

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