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

itsnicethat.com

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

#61

Post by AlecSchueler »

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…

> Can a language model trained largely on Anglo-American texts generate stories that are culturally relevant to other nationalities?

I'm happy to be critical of the ability of LLMs but most humans would struggle with this as well.

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

#62

Post by AlecSchueler »

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.

I feel like the linguistic nature of them is more appealing to a broad audience than games or social media.

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

#63

Post by AlecSchueler »

justonceokay wrote: post #24
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

Source?

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

#65

Post by jovial_cavalier »

jvanderbot wrote: post #47
jovial_cavalier wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can understand not realizing that ChatGPT would give a bunch of similar sounding article titles to everyone, and I can understand being a little embarrassed that you didn't realize that. But why would you feel a "personal stake" in the output of an LLM? If you feel personal stake in something, you definitely should not be using an LLM for it.

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

#66

Post by gilleain »

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.

I'm launching a new service to tell people that they are absolutely, 100% wrong. That what they are considering is a terrible idea, has been done before, and will never work.

Possibly I can outsource the work to HN comments :)

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

#67

Post by vintermann »

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…

So if I understand it correctly, they only asked for a midterm essay topic? It wasn't steered towards these topics in any way, for instance by asking for a midterm essay topic for (teacher)'s Technology and Society class?

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

#68

Post by astrobe_ »

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 was on HN's frontpage previously too; I immediately thought that this comic would say more or less the same thing. Perhaps both came from an AI? :D

But in another paragraph, the article says that the teacher and the students also failed to detect an AI-generated piece.

The ending of the comic is a bit anti-climatic (aside from the fact that one can see it coming), as similarities between creations are not uncommon. Endings, guitar riffs, styles being invented twice independently is not uncommon. For instance, the mystery genre was apparently created independently by Doyle and Poe (Poe, BTW, in Philosophy of composition [1], also claims that good authors start from the ending).

Two pieces being similar because they come from same AI versus because two authors were inspired and influenced by the same things and didn't know about each other's works, the difference is thin. An extrapolation of this topic is the sci-fi trope ( e.g. Beatless [2] ) about whether or not the emotions that an android simulates are real. But this is still sci-fi though, current AIs are good con artists at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatless

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

#70

Post by Antibabelic »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #50
whiplash451 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Which is why, historically, ~all scientific discoveries have been made by multiple researchers (or teams) independently, at roughly the same time

This is quite a big claim. All of them? I know there are many discoveries that fit the pattern you're pointing out, but I wouldn't go as far as to say all, or even the majority of them do.

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