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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

#51

Post by watwut »

bootsmann wrote: post #18
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 also happens with cover letters and CVs in recruiting now. Even if the HR person is not the brightest bulb, they figure out the MO after reading 5 cover letters in a row who all more or less tell the same story.

CV were always BS tho - on both sides.

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

#52

Post by vidarh »

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…

Or the students have enhanced the results by picking the very samey outcomes out of a more varied pool of suggestions.

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

#53

Post by flir »

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 very early results for "watercolour of X" were quite nice. Amateurish, loose, sloppy. Interesting. Today's are... well, every single one looks like it came off a chocolate box. There's definitely been a trend towards a corporate-friendly aesthetic. A narrowing.

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

#54

Post by xg15 »

I remember watching Argylle and for the first time having the feeling that the movie was not just bad but that the script was likely AI generated.

It had some ideas that would have been interesting or at least "clever" in isolation, but they were strung together in a weirdly arbitrary and soulless way. Even a convoluted money-grap sequel usually has some idea where it wants to go with the plot. This movie didn't.

It was also strangely obsessed with "twists", or rather different things that could be described using that word: Twist, the dance, twisting roads and plot twists all featured in the movie.

Might have been a coincidence, but it felt as if an AI got an ambiguous prompt "the movie should have twists" and then executed several different interpretations of that sentence at the same time.

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

#55

Post by flir »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #43
calaphos wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 w…

> a protagonist lives in or returns home to a small town and resolves a minor conflict by reconnecting with tradition and organising community events

That's... not the Hero's Journey?

(The same study run against Claude Opus would be interesting - if we're going to test models, we might as well play to their strengths. My prediction: better writing, not better plotting).

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

#56

Post by ashoeafoot »

DrewADesign wrote: post #35
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.

[dead]

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

#57

Post by AlecSchueler »

pmg101 wrote: post #32
andrepd wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're exactly right, this really gets to the heart of the issue and demonstrates that you're already thinking like a linguist.

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

#58

Post by AlecSchueler »

watwut wrote: post #51
bootsmann wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This also happens with cover letters and CVs in recruiting now. Even if the HR person is not the brightest bulb, they figure out the MO after reading 5 cover letters in a row who all more or less tell the same story.

CV were always BS tho - on both sides.

Yeah I've been trying to write a short press bio for a musical project recently and it's next to impossible not to make it sound AI generated.

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

#59

Post by AlecSchueler »

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 you're just proving the point with these examples.

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

#60

Post by thw_9a83c »

markild wrote: post #37
Antibabelic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> humans each model will produce fairly similar results on each prompt, but it helps having 8 billion different models running

Yes, that was my point. We don't have 8 billion AI models. Furthermore, existing models are also trained on heavily overlapping data. The collective creativity and inventiveness of humans far exceeds what AI can currently do for us.

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