Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

To take a simple example: I grew up with computer games in the '80s where there were no 'physics engines' or frameworks for building games. As a result, each game was an expression of the author's personality somehow. Fast forward to the noughties, games bored me as they mostly looked and felt the same, or maybe felt like 3-5 different games all packaged differently.

Another example: going abroad on holiday in Europe (I'm from London) used to be a relatively wild, vibrant experience, filled with unexpected differences and challenges (not all positive). There were no McDonalds or Starbucks and the shops were filled with unfamiliar products and foods. Now everywhere in Europe feels the same when I visit, especially with smartphone in hand.

And films went from wildly different to one another to what now feels like 'arty' and 'CGI' being the two choices.

This article continues that into the realm of ideas, or idea production. Everywhere you go looks and feels familiar.

Or am I just getting old?

It's true that in a project, a novel idea undeclared as such will be shaved off quietly by an llm. You really need to be explicit about wanting to keep it.

You will get pushed into the mean.

However, I'd say 90% of making something (that is useful) is repeating the old thing. We stand on the shoulders of giants. Or at least we should. Getting there can be difficult for most of us.

I say this as someone who chronically re-invents things. I then later get stuck and find someone already thought through my problem and solved it better.

I don't believe being unique in all the ways is useful. You need to be unique in the important ways and not unique in the other places.

There's also a cultural coherence angle that (my) unique things often fail at. Stuff has to look like other stuff enough for people to understand intuitively what it is and how it works. Here the mean is your friend.

I am able to explore more unique spaces because I no longer deal with the minutia of getting the things that should be the same correct. So paradoxically, this has made my output more unique.

There's a very interesting opportunity here for a deeper investigation.

- What does "regression to the mean" actually mean in practice when the LLM is conditioned on a possibly large amount of context?

- How does this perceived regression to the mean affect the result in different applications? When implementing code, it may show up as keeping it simple, hence easily understandable, "nonclever". When writing documentation, it may show up as simple language, short sentences, etc. supporting the intent of communicating with little friction to a broad audience. When brainstorming product ideas, it may show up as regurgitating old and boring ideas, but dressed in fancy language and affirmations that hide the shallowness of the content.

- What can be done to alter this behavior? Now that temperature doesn't seem to be a parameter anymore in new models, how can we steer creativity of the model?

- If the model's creativity is fundamentally limited, is there a way we can use it to support us in the expression of our creativity, leveraging the different strengths of humans and LLMs in a way that the result transcends the limits of either?

Unfortunately, I don't see the article doing that. And, while I know pointing out LLM-isms is often a cheap shot these days, I feel compelled to point out that this article is full of what I perceived as LLM-ism, quite ironic given the premise and the statement ("written off-distribution · on purpose").

E.g.

> Trained on the past, it answers in the past tense of thought. Not what is true. What is typical.

> We converge — not on what is right, but on what is average.

> Not the answer it was sure of — the one it would not stop correcting

For the purpose of discussion though, this also undersells AIs:

1. They CAN be great tools for novelty + discovery! You just need to ask and explore and put in work. Its not "easy", but it does help.

2. Sometimes "the mean" is what you want. Sometimes I'm not after art. I'm after something efficient and recognizable and easy to maintain.

How this oversells AIs:

1. We are losing the muscle of forced creativity and problem solving. There is a certain kind of learned privilege that comes from facing a problem and having your instinctive reaction be to ask for and expect help from something else rather than to roll up your sleeves or sit back and have a think. If the system incentivizes loss of muscle en-masse, we're gonna lose something beautiful and powerful.

99% of the time we don't need a true intellectual breakthrough to get the job done, and often 'new ideas' are simply riffs on or blends of old ones, like fashion or music genres.

The worry to me, however, is that if society comes to rely on this form of 'AI' then eventually the model collapse bleeds into academia (e.g. grant proposals reviewed by AI?) causing a kind of incremental sociocognitive atrophy. Everything becomes a reaffirmation of the status quo.

That being said I think people said something similar about electronic calculators (that if you couldn't do long division by hand then you'd be too incompetent for higher-level calculus.)

https://mapwriting.substack.com/p/living-subscription-free-i...

It's the same problem that AI faces of Model Collapse: AIs that train on the internet ultimately just end up training on one another, stop moving forward, and end up as identical polished versions of one another

I now think of it as a Dr. Jekyll/ Mr. Hyde situation for software projects:

- Dr. Jekyll: For makers, the only limit is your imagination, architectural guidance, and token budget. Time to build!

- Mr. Hyde: For projects to get off the treadmill of having to copy others to maintain you position, you need to redefine how the project works and provides unique value. Features and quality are no longer the answer. Time to fight!

But, there is some truth to the article and perhaps it is more true in chat based interactions. The agentic, hands-off mode might tell a different story.

But yes, LLMs are likely to force permanent conformity.

One could also talk about how language in general shifts with the population, but LLMs are likely to prevent it. One would think anthropologists are already looking into this experimentally...

If you bring something new to the table, then in my experience, AIs are really good at helping you ground it old ideas. If you want to set it and forget it, then you will get the mean. If you want to do something new, in my experience, they are enablers and not blockers.

I think that perhaps there's a bit of hope, that by the forces of the market, the value of human distinctiveness will rise in comparison to whatever is the generated mean. This is what I am looking into.

The pushback is soft, and constant: Did you mean: the familiar thing, offered in place of yours."

Ouch, that's scary to think of.

Also why does it read like its written by ChatGPT?

First of all, neural nets do nit return averages per se. They construct space between the points and extrapolate outside of the points. So even if a point was not in their training data, they will be ok, in many situations, to acknowledge it.

Or in other words - LLMs don’t average. They construct world models. A novel thing that fits their world model will be accepted no prob. A thing that doesn’t may still be accepted but with challenges.

The same is true though for humans, including scientists. There is a saying that science moves one grave at a time - because often prev gen of scientists needs to die off for a new idea to take root.

Or in yet other words - even if llms produced averages, an average of a discontinuous set can lie outside of that set. And the set of all human ideas is very much discontinuous.

Anyway, going to read the actual piece but felt I needed this off my chest.

The problem is that this is a contradiction, and a pretty common misunderstanding. When we talk about something being probable, we're talking about what we don't know. When you extrapolate, you're saying something about the unknown, you're creating something new. While you can extrapolate into the past or the future, in the way this line is talking, it's answering in a future tense. I think even worse is that beneath this it says

> returned at the speed of certainty

At that point we're no longer talking about probabilities!

The problem isn't that these machines aren't capable of making new things. The whole of their mathematical grounding is in the creation of the unknown from the known. The problem is precisely that they are sold as miracle cures where they can produce great results for little effort. The law of "you get out of it what you put into it" still holds true. Undirected, uninspired usage of these statistical models gets you mediocre at-best results. Without an understanding of the underlying theory and mechanisms of how these models work (it's not just transformers, but any statistical model), driving the whole of the inference chain with maximal control as one might Max/MSP, as well as mastery over the target domain, you will effectively achieve nothing but "slop".

Of course, there's a whole other discussion here, which is that this site seems to be victim to the same grave ignorance that has caused the supposed "crisis of newness" within the arts (which has been talked about for much longer than these models have existed). That's a whole other can of worms, but essentially it's bunk. In modernity we can point to the last century of unending artistic innovation, and panic that this is slowing down, that this is the end of history. In truth, that century is anomalous. It's the most anomalous we've ever recorded, where real material changes were reacted to in real time. The innovations of modernism weren't born because of pretense to being original. It was wholly derived from the changes happening in reality irrespective of the arts, as a result of the industrial revolution, and later the information revolution. The norm in history is centuries of very slow refinement, barely perceptible on the timeline of a generation. Tiny little incremental changes stacked up over a long period of time. Bombastic, revolutionary artistic progress is the anomaly. An unending cacophony of that progress has happened exactly once in the entire history of humanity, as far as we can tell. There is a stupid expectation that the 20th century's breakneck pace was going to last forever. Obviously it wasn't. It was never a sustainable momentum, statistical models or not. People are still in the mindset it's the norm. The languishing over creative bankruptcy is simply the death of this delusional fantasy.