Back at uni a teacher used to say everything (in design, at least) has already been made - so yes, "creativity" was an act to put things that already exist and nobody thought about putting together before.
Copying is the way design works (2020)
91–100 of 245 posts
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#92Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses. Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives.…
It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs don't have experience though. They have training data, and a probabilistic output. Designing things have two goals: - Make old things seem new - Make new things seem old and familiar Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made in a vacuum and without input. Edit: To expand:…
> LLMs don't have experience though.
They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they get exposed to things outside their training distribution, they search solution space and discover things. Like AlphaZero, I think search and real world interaction are the key ingredients. For AZ the world was a game board with an opponent, but rich enough to discover novel strategies.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#93> In a 2005 forum post, John Carmack explained his thoughts on patents. While patents are framed as protecting inventors, he wrote, that’s seldom how they’re used. Smart programmers working on hard problems tend to come up with the same solutions.
I find this happens in UI/UX design too. When you're trying to come with the best interface for a problem, there's only so many directions that make sense once you've explored the design space and understood all the constraints.
With desktop and mobile interfaces for example, all operating systems and devices have converged on a lot of similar patterns and visuals. I don't think this is because people are unoriginal, but given the constraints, there's only so many decent options to pick from so many designers will inevitably converge on the same solution.
> I’m a designer. As a designer, I feel the need to be original.
I'll often come up with a solution on my own after immersing myself in a problem for a while, then after looking at existing work more later, find it's already been done. I'll then sometimes even consider changing my solution so it doesn't look like I copied, but usually there's no obvious other direction you can go in that is close to as good.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs don't have experience though. They have training data, and a probabilistic output. Designing things have two goals: - Make old things seem new - Make new things seem old and familiar Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made in a vacuum and without input. Edit: To expand:…
> LLMs don't have experience though. They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they get exposed to things outside their training distribution, they search solution sp…
This sounds like an ad. What is "assisted 100s of millions of people in many billions of tasks"? Any real world data? If it's generating new random clip art for presentations, sure. If it's making new flavor text based on generic input, sure.
If my question is "what is the circumference of earth", and I run a model with a temperature of 100, will it give me a good result? Will it always give me a good result with a temperature of 0? I don't think so. It's a huge probabilistic model. It is not an oracle. It can be useful for fuzzy tasks for sure, but not for being smart. You might think it's clever because it's generated code for you, but that's probably because you asked it to make something 500 people already made and published on GitHub.
Edit: Just to clarify. Don't want to step on peoples toes. I just feel like we're at the top of a new dotcom/crypto/nft hype boom. Seen it soooooooo many times before since the beginning of the 2000s. Don't go blind on technology. Research what it actually is. An LLM is a "next word weighted dice toss machine".
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#95> As a designer, I feel the need to be original. If you’re a designer, or even if you’re just interested in design, you probably feel the need to be original, too. I've been a professional designer since 2006, and I got over that thinking pretty quickly. A designer trying to be strikingly original is rarely acting in service of the design. If you want to be strikingly original, you probably want to be an artist inste…
Maybe even if you copy and reuse virtually everything the composition can be original if you are not just applying the latest trends blindly because it's shiny and new. I come from IT architecture and for me this is the best transposition of originality for the concept of "there is no silver bullet". Do you think this also counts as originality?
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#96Copying isn’t just how design works, it’s how everything works. Humans are imitation machines. We create new things by collecting, regurgitating and mutating stuff we experience, just like LLMs. In a vacuum man has no ideas outside of base impulses. Hence why originality is a novice belief. The closer you get to any field, the more you realize the stories around who made all the breakthroughs are BS media narratives.…
It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs don't have experience though. They have training data, and a probabilistic output. Designing things have two goals: - Make old things seem new - Make new things seem old and familiar Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made in a vacuum and without input. Edit: To expand:…
I don't know if I buy that an AI wouldn't have been able to come up with touchscreen. It knows people touch screens with pens, and it knows people point and touch things that aren't screens. It could put those ideas together, that's how people came up with
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#97This is a great quote: > In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] h…
This quote like many others are funny because people pretend that they can exactly remember things said decades earlier. Andy Hertzfeld later updated this entry on his website:
"....Here is Mike Boich's recollection of the 'Xerox' story, which goes a little differently, and is likely to be more faithful than mine: The meeting was one of the quarterly meetings, where Steve, Mike Murray, Belleville, you and I all got together with the Microsoft crew, which at was usually Bill, Jeff Harbers, Jon Shirley, and sometimes Neil and/or Charles Simonyi. I don't recall whether Windows had been announced, or we were just concerned about it, but Steve was trying to convince Bill that having a "Chinese wall between the Windows implementers and the Mac implementors wasn't sufficient for us to work well together. He was trying to get them to forget about the OS business, since the applications business would be much bigger total dollars. He said, "It's not that I don't trust you, but my team doesn't trust you. It's kind of like if your brother was beating up on my brother, people wouldn't say it was just your brother against my brother, they would say the Gates are fighting with the Jobs." Bill responded that "No Steve, I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox, and you went in to steal the TV, and found that somebody else had stolen it. So you say, "hey, that's not fair. I wanted to steal the TV"."
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> LLMs don't have experience though. They might not have had experience 2 years ago, but in the meantime they assisted 100s of millions of people for many billion tasks. Many of them are experiences you can't find in a book. They contain on-topic feedback and even real world outcomes to LLM ideas. Deployed LLMs create experiences, they get exposed to things outside their training distribution, they search solution sp…
This sounds like an ad. What is "assisted 100s of millions of people in many billions of tasks"? Any real world data? If it's generating new random clip art for presentations, sure. If it's making new flavor text based on generic input, sure. If my question is "what is the circumference of earth", and I run a model with a temperature of 100, will it give me a good result? Will it always give me a good result with a t…
And to expand on myself. "Experience" means something very specific for humans. It means you have done something for a long time, and you have failed at it. And you have learned from experience. By definition, LLMs don't have any experience at all. They are trained and become a fresh "brain", and then they make the same mistakes, over and over and over, until they either get a new prompt that might correct themselves or are trained from scratch all over again.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very Hackernews to throw LLMs in there, but I agree. LLMs don't have experience though. They have training data, and a probabilistic output. Designing things have two goals: - Make old things seem new - Make new things seem old and familiar Both need a lot of knowledge about how humans work and how we have made sense of the world up until now. Design can't be made in a vacuum and without input. Edit: To expand:…
I don't know if I buy that an AI wouldn't have been able to come up with touchscreen. It knows people touch screens with pens, and it knows people point and touch things that aren't screens. It could put those ideas together, that's how people came up with
It's not an AI. It's a word probability model. Trained on tons of text. It's not smart at all. The only reason why it might have "figured that out" is because it was actually present in scifi texts in the 60s. The other reason would be that you increased the temperature to something like 100, and then you think you see something genius in some hallucinations, among other unreadable text.
Re: Copying is the way design works (2020)
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would they give away 1m in stock just to look?
OP misrepresented what happened (intentionally or otherwise). They didn't give away $1M in stock, they granted Xerox the right to buy $1M in stock.
Same difference. At some point you're just arguing about what the number was. I don't care about the broader argument, but the right to buy $1MM of private shares is, in fact, real consideration.