The 100k whys of AI

Post by Planktonne » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

gmerc wrote: post #28

scotty79 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also since those are lazy, you are also asking always in the same manner. How homogeneous were the prompts that generated those covers? People are making cookies with cookie cutter number 5 and other people wonder how come they are all the same.

Classic self selection effect though - if you’re resorting to LLM writing you’re almost certainly skewing lazy enough to not even bother trying to add perturbations strong enough to make the response deviate from the uniformity of the slop.

Post by oasisbob » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

tantivy wrote: post #22

rusk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect there are new invariants emerging. We don’t know what they are and we will probably have to reach into the liberal arts to describe them but to me what you’re seeing is akin to the subatomic world exposing itself through diffraction patterns.

You're just looking for the study of rhetoric. LLMs have clustered on certain rhetorical patterns/gestures, probably because of a combination of frequency in input and bias in training. But rhetoric also concerns the logical structures that underpin communicative techniques, and it's this logical infrastructure that's shaky or bizarre in LLM content (like the GP noticing how "pushback" always resolves without further…

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 6:40 PM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #63

dlenski wrote: post #2

A nice illustration of the homogeneity of LLM responses. Another way to describe this effect would be… If you ask humans to write 1,000 books, you're asking 1,000 different humans with different experiences and different skills and different moods (etc.) to write those books. But if you ask LLMs to write 1,000 books, you're probably only talking to 3 or 5 different models, tops. And they've all trained on the same or…

LLMs are great at producing average. We see this with their GenAI music equivalents. All the music these GenAI models produce is exceptionally (aggressively, even) average. It is the most polished average you'll ever find. Never awful (anymore), never fantastic. Just bang in the middle.

Post by coldtea » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 6:42 PM UTC

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #50

noduerme wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That whole thing would get you 1000 variants of existing art. But if you asked a thousand different designers to do a cover for the same book...

> 1000 variants of existing art. This is very naive. I can almost guarantee that some combinations of 20 * 50 features will hit on something that has never been written before in that specific combination . And if that's still not enough, increase the number of features. Add more randomness, add more steering, add random steering in random chapters, change it up, and so on.

Post by Animats » Sun, Jun 21, 2026, 7:02 PM UTC