aifaq.wtf

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Three new working papers show that AI-generated ideas are often judged as both more creative and more useful than the ones humans come up with

The newsletter itself looks at three studies that I have no read, but we can pull some quotes out regardless:

• The ideas AI generates are better than what most people can come up with, but very creative people will beat the AI (at least for now), and may benefit less from using AI to generate ideas

• There is more underlying similarity in the ideas that the current generation of AIs produce than among ideas generated by a large number of humans

The idea of variance being higher between humans than between LLMs is an interesting one - while you might get good ideas (or better ideas!) from a language model, you aren't going to get as many ideas. Add in the fact that we're all using the same LLMs and we get subtly steered in one direction or another... maybe right to McDonald's?

Now we can argue til the cows come home about measures of creativity, but this hits home:

We still don’t know how original AIs actually can be, and I often see people argue that LLMs cannot generate any new ideas... In the real world, most new ideas do not come from the ether; they are based on combinations existing concepts, which is why innovation scholars have long pointed to the importance of recombination in generating ideas. And LLMs are very good at this, acting as connection machines between unexpected concepts. They are trained by generating relationships between tokens that may seem unrelated to humans but represent some deeper connections.