The 100k Whys of AI

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 similar data, and are trained to respond in very similar ways.

The LLMs don't differ much in anything like "life experience" or "skills", and they don't really have anything like a "mood" independent of the prompts you've given them.

When you generate one or two blog posts with LLM they look pretty good. And you will be impressed with that one clever bit it adds that you didn't even ask for. But then you generate 50 of them and they all converge into the same pattern. It's hard to prove that an article is AI generated but they are instantly recognizable.

An aside, I usually take my written blog posts through a pass on Notebooklm to generate a podcast like discussion about it. It used to be a good way to extract some insights I haven't thought of. But after 50 of them, I can predict what the host will "pushback" on and exactly when. Then they magically resolve their differences and agree with whatever the idea was. It's truly impressive when you just consume sporadically. But listen frequently and they converge into one blob.

There used to be a word for this in generative AI: mode collapse. It's not that the model doesn't generate human-like responses, it's that it generates the same 0.0001% of possible human like responses every time. It's almost certainly the instruction tuning which is responsible, maybe some small part of blame could go to the rollout policy (I have no idea how rollout policy works these days).

It's even more worrying when you look at the contents of these "books", they are riddled with erros:

https://infosec.exchange/@lcamtuf/116785283147249092

On HN many comments under many threads are about whether the submission was written by AI. You could say I have noticed a pattern in Hacker News comments!

In these comments there's a common pattern where some users argue that they do not agree that the submission was LLM written and they often focus on specific details to refute it (e.g em-dashes) and some users see the overall pattern clearly that it's totally obvious. For me it's a kind of smell, it's off putting and it's obvious. The article says to "trust your gut". But it's also something that comes with practice and time, it's not some innate thing. People may have better things to do than expend mental energy noticing patterns in a bunch of social media posts. The more I see it, the more I see it.

The take away I get is that it's okay to notice patterns and it's okay to not notice patterns. Remember that other people may be noticing patterns and associations in things that you might miss. Be charitable.

Far more interesting questions are:

1) If you cant see the patterns of LLM writing, does the idea that the thing you liked was written by LLM worry you?

2) If you can see the patterns clearly is the fact that it's LLM written worry you?

Because in our comments there's many who do not care that LLM's are writing content and theres many who do care. But are these correlated with those who can see the LLMs or who are blind to them?

Notably, in programming this is actually a desirable feature for most problems. Even human programmers are taught to produce predictable and obvious code whenever possible. I wonder is ultimately this is an artifact of optimizing the models for code, that they become less creative.

The whole point of the thesis is that because the cover image are very similar, therefore LLMs are bad at writing text?

I think it's that today's LLMs have access to poor/generic image generation models and people find it easier to ask ChatGPT or NanoBanana to make a cover instead of fine tuning a small SD model for the purpose.

I think for that instance to carry weight you would have to provide evidence that the mosaic of books were the product of different people using AI. If it is just one person doing variations on the same thing then it wouldn't mean very much.

I think a majority of content consumers can already distinguish LLM content from human content. I'm looking forward to the day that they're intelligent enough to care, but I'm not holding my breath. Orwell framed it pretty well in 1984 with the machine-generated songs that were new every year, but always tugged on the heartstrings of the proles. They weren't really readers or listeners to music or appreciators of art before, and they can be caught in the trap indefinitely, since they'll never be aware or what came before or what's being done now outside their AI-driven feed.

Horselover Fat had a pretty good take on machine generated content, too.

Is tweaking a temperature of the model not a thing anymore?

Maybe the LLMs need some kind of "coverage" metric so they prioritise new paths? The author would know a thing or two about that.

We likes this "same, complex set of mannerism" when using LLM for programming. If you ask LLM to write a certain function for you, it gives you statistically obvious implementation. But maybe for writing an original book, this feature is not so desirable

I don't want to hurt people's feelings, so in person I restrain myself from speaking out (it wouldn't change anything anyway)... but every person I have seen so far, who was bullish on building an AI business has followed the same path:

  1) They think the AI can replace them, but in a good way: "it will keep doing my job and people will pay ME"
  2) They assume people either don't notice or don't mind that it's AI. They build businesses, where AI impersonates a professional when that person is not available ("chat with your therapist any time even if they sleep!")
  3) All they do is based on written or spoken words. There is no substance

I expect that sooner than later a great skepticism for anything non-tangible will develop. Personally, I have been highly distrustful of people who don't build things (even the word "building" is now tainted). I think it will accelerate.

I love the illustration of the same-ness of AI.

One question / quibble:

> if a hundred “authors” give their favorite AI tool a similar prompt

Do we really believe there are 100 different people generating those? When I saw the books, I assumed they were generated on demand to match the (to me unlikely) search terms.

I don’t think I’m invested enough to research this. Amazon slop is harder and harder to wade through. (Searches are very imprecise. Deliberate, I’m sure.)

It’s actually pretty easy to distinguish AI from real text because all AI generated texts have 2.4 children. In aggregate it is indistinguishable statistically but for a given text it’s remarkably easy.

Have you seen Egyptian paintings or Hollywood movies?

Everything is slop if you make enough of it and squint hard enough.

The point with AI is if and how to steer it to produce something that is interesting and unique for you, not another bland cookie cutter blockbuster or lame summer song.

Ignore me

I don't know how much of a smoking gun this actually is, the evidence proffered doesn't establish anything - I can see some names there like Havilah Brooks or Celina Briar who are intentionally re-using the same title to create a series, for example. And this doesn't really get into the base rate of generic title re-use among encyclopedias. There isn't much reward for coming up with an imaginative title for kids, they're not very experienced. I'd have no trouble believing publishers come up with very similarly titled books in the kids encyclopedia all the time, they already recycle plots like there is no yesterday in fantasy.

I think the article's point is probably sound to some great extent, but I would believe I owned a book with a title like "100,000 Whys" when I was young. With a dinosaur and a rocket on the front. I loved dinosaurs and rockets, they're even still cool today.