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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

#71

Post by Antibabelic »

throwbway37383 wrote: post #44
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.

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 a…

LLMs and image generation models will also give crazy variable output when you give an open-ended prompt and increase temperature. However, we usually want high coherence and relevance, both from human and synthetic responses.

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

#72

Post by pmg101 »

gilleain wrote: post #66
pmg101 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

This sounds like a terrible idea that has been done before and will never work.

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

#73

Post by ultropolis »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #58
watwut wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I will tell you my cover letter secret*, which has gotten me a disproportionate number of interviews**:

Do NOT write a professional cover letter. Crack a joke. Use quirky language. Be overly familiar. A dash of TMI. Do NOT think about what you are going to say, just write a bunch of crazy-pants. Once your intro is too long, cut the fat. Now add professional stuff. You are not writing a cover letter, you are writing a caricature of a cover letter.

You just made the recruiter/HR/person doing interviews smile***. They remember your cover letter. In fact they repeat your objectively-unprofessional-yet-insightful joke to somebody else. You get the call. You are hired.

This will turn off some employers. You didn't want to work for them anyway.

* admittedly I have not sought work via resume in more than 15 years. ymmv

** Once a friend found a cover letter I had written in somebody's corp blog titled "Either the best or worst cover letter of all time" (or words to that effect). In it I had claimed that I could get the first 80% of their work done on schedule, but that the second 80% and third 80% would require unknown additional time. (note: I did not get the call)

*** unless they are using AI to read cover letters, but I repeat: you didn't want to work for them anyway.

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

#74

Post by DrewADesign »

AlecSchueler wrote: post #62
DrewADesign wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IMO What makes online games and social media different from LLM chat bots is what’s (supposed to be) on the other end: people. Some people seem to feel it more than others, but human connection is one of the most fundamental facets of human existence. It’s compelling because there’s another human being you’re sharing an experience with, not because there’s a method of generating the text that would result from that. Even when people interact with bots in those other online realms, most of them are only doing so because they think it’s a person.

Meta removed the ai accounts from Instagram because most of the people that even gave the feature a second thought, were just mad because they couldn’t block them. I’ll bet they were NOT cheap to implement, and they were not some nascent bing chat era blunder— it was 2025. I think that’s a harbinger of future ‘socialize with LLMs’ feature adoption.

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

#75

Post by ultropolis »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #65
jvanderbot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because you thought that you had collaborated with the LLM, not that it had fed you ideas. Have you and a partner both believed you contributed more than 50% of a project's work? Like that.

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

#76

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

cantor_S_drug wrote: post #49

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 p…

Is stagnation a goal?

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

#78

Post by skayvr »

We're missing out on the serendipity of search and possibly duplication of work. Answer's are handed out without work, which leads to bland results.

Treated properly, I think AI proofreading wouldn't necessarily lead to this. Your initial work is like the 'hypothesis'. Then AI does the cleanup and a high-level lit review. Just don't let it change your direction like the writer did in the comic.

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

#79

Post by jvanderbot »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #65
jvanderbot wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Again, the statement "if you feel a personal stake in something, you definitely should not be using an LLM for it" is a learned response. To folks just forming their brains, LLMs are a natural extension of technology. Like PaulG said, his kid was unimpressed because "Of course the computer answers questions, that's what it does".

The subtlety of it, and the "obvious" limitations of it, are something we either know because we grew up watching tech over decades, or were just naturally cynical and mistrusting and guessed right this time. Hard earned wisdom or a broken clock being right this time, either way, that's not the default teenager.

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

#80

Post by mikewarot »

This isn't unique to AI, it's a danger anytime you outsource things. Look at the stories we've had with a single programmer working for multiple companies. If they manage to keep up the appearance of being a full timer, all those companies will end up with the same quirks in their products, because the person just copy/pasted things.

We've seen this across culture, for instance there are "Russian Endings" to stories, which leave things...

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