This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I agree that, when it comes to creative endeavours, there’s just no “there” there with current AI systems. They just don’t “get it”. I’m reminded of this tweet:
Mark Cummins: After using Deep Research for a while, I finally get the “it’s just slop” complaint people have about AI art.
Because I don’t care much about art, most AI art seems pretty good to me. But information is something where I’m much closer to a connoisseur, and Deep Research is just nowhere near a good human output. It’s not useless, I think maybe ~20% of the time I get something I’m satisfied with. Even then, there’s this kind of hall-of-mirrors quality to the output, I can’t fully trust it, it’s subtly distorted. I feel like I’m wading through epistemic pollution.
Obviously it’s going to improve, and probably quite rapidly. If it read 10x more sources, thought 100x longer, and had 1000x lower error rate, I think that would do it. So no huge leap required, just turning some knobs, it’s definitely going to get there. But at the same time, it’s quite jarring to me that a large fraction of people already find the outputs compelling.
As someone who does care about art, and has, I think, discerning taste, I have always kind of felt this, and only when I read the above tweet did I realise that not everyone felt what I felt. When Sam Altman tweeted that story, which seemed to impress some people and inspire disgust/ridicule from others, the division became even clearer.
I think with Deep Research the slop is actually not as much of a problem—you can just treat it as a web search on steroids and can always jump into the cited sources to verify things. And for similar reasons, it seems true that if DR “read 10x more sources, thought 100x longer, and had 1000x lower error rate”, it could be as good as me at doing bounded investigations. For the hardest bits needed for AI to generate genuinely good creative fiction, it feels less obvious whether the same type of predictable progress will happen.
I think I’m less sure than you that the problem has to do with attractor basins, though. That does feel part of or related to the problem, but I think a larger issue is that chatbots are not coherent enough. Good art has a sort of underlying internal logic to it, which even if you do not notice it contributes to making the artwork feel like a unified whole. Chatbots don’t do that, they are too all over the place.
Yeah, I agree that I’m probably too attached to the attractor basin idea here. It seems like some sort of weighted combination between that and what you suggest, though I’d frame the “all over the place” as the chatbots not actually having enough of something (parameters? training data? oomph?) to capture the actual latent structure of very good short (or longer) fiction. It could be as simple as there being an awful lot of terrible poetry that doesn’t have the latent structure that great stuff has, online. If that’s a big part of the problem, we should solve it sooner than I’d otherwise expect.
This is a great post, thanks for writing it. I agree that, when it comes to creative endeavours, there’s just no “there” there with current AI systems. They just don’t “get it”. I’m reminded of this tweet:
As someone who does care about art, and has, I think, discerning taste, I have always kind of felt this, and only when I read the above tweet did I realise that not everyone felt what I felt. When Sam Altman tweeted that story, which seemed to impress some people and inspire disgust/ridicule from others, the division became even clearer.
I think with Deep Research the slop is actually not as much of a problem—you can just treat it as a web search on steroids and can always jump into the cited sources to verify things. And for similar reasons, it seems true that if DR “read 10x more sources, thought 100x longer, and had 1000x lower error rate”, it could be as good as me at doing bounded investigations. For the hardest bits needed for AI to generate genuinely good creative fiction, it feels less obvious whether the same type of predictable progress will happen.
I think I’m less sure than you that the problem has to do with attractor basins, though. That does feel part of or related to the problem, but I think a larger issue is that chatbots are not coherent enough. Good art has a sort of underlying internal logic to it, which even if you do not notice it contributes to making the artwork feel like a unified whole. Chatbots don’t do that, they are too all over the place.
Yeah, I agree that I’m probably too attached to the attractor basin idea here. It seems like some sort of weighted combination between that and what you suggest, though I’d frame the “all over the place” as the chatbots not actually having enough of something (parameters? training data? oomph?) to capture the actual latent structure of very good short (or longer) fiction. It could be as simple as there being an awful lot of terrible poetry that doesn’t have the latent structure that great stuff has, online. If that’s a big part of the problem, we should solve it sooner than I’d otherwise expect.