7 ms·

Art or Artifice? Large Language Models and the False Promise of Creativity

60 points by p4bl0 3y ago

letmevoteplease 3y ago
The most interesting part to me is that Claude 1.3 outperformed GPT-4.[1] They also note that Claude stories are "more likely to be attributed to an amateur writer than an AI, whereas GPT3.5 and GPT4 stories are 80%+ attributed to AI." [1] https://i.imgur.com/TnOw8Jw.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TnOw8Jw.jpg
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  That's honestly not surprising. Whatever RLHF Open ai does to the GPT models really messes with its creative writing. Like a hallmark filter over output if you don't try to steer it away. The Instruct models don't have the same problem to that degree. I really hope Open ai releases a GPT-4 Instruct model, for this reason and for chess.
causality0 3y ago
An interesting study but a horrible title. Calling the entire concept of creativity by LLMs a "false promise" in 2023, three years after the launch of the first commercial LLMs, like someone in 1897 three years after the first production car calling the automobile a "false promise of commuting".
- vannevar 3y ago
  Right---it's like comparing ten-year-old Hemingway's writing to 40-year-old Hemingway's writing.
kenjackson 3y ago
They’re comparing LLM output to professional creative writers? That seems like a high bar to start with. I’d think that would be the highest bar they could achieve. How does it compare though to your average college student? Also I feel like I haven’t heard people say that much about their ability to be creative. It’s more about their ability to generate human like content — and most human content isn’t that creative either.
- famouswaffles 3y ago
  Yeah GPT-4, the current Sota isn't generally professional/expert level in most domains so this isn't exactly surprising revelation even if true. This paper also suffers from the "single pass problem". LLMs aren't that new anymore. Most researchers should know that whatever you get on a single pass can be/is often much lower quality than if taking the effort to be more specific, provide examples or breaking the task down and going through multiple passes. From my experience getting several LLMs to write, this doesn't hold any less true in the domain of creative writing so there's a very good chance this paper severely underestimates the potential of even current LLMs.
- ToucanLoucan 3y ago
  > They’re comparing LLM output to professional creative writers? I mean that seems a fair experiment to judge based on the rhetoric employed by AI enthusiasts, who talk of things like "democratizing art" (as though art as it exists is somehow anti-democratic?) and letting any layman slam some text into a prompt and get a work of shakespeare, a painting by Da Vinci, or a Mozart symphony back. I think it's nonsense but they don't, so test it?
- vannevar 3y ago
  Yes, it's a testament to how powerful these models have become in a such a short time that we've gone from being impressed that they can write a coherent paragraph to being critical that they can't win a professional writing competition, all in the span of 5 years.
  - loa_in_ 3y ago
    We is a broad term. Do we really count surfacing of an article like that as we being critical?
    - vannevar 3y ago
      More accurate to say "some" being critical, sure. But we're talking about it, so I think the juxtaposition is fair.
commandlinefan 3y ago
I'm seeing a lot of AI-generated images on my facebook feed (they're of, um, predictable subjects) - if a human generated one, it would definitely be considered "art". Is Shrek not art because computers generated it based on input from humans?
- krapp 3y ago
  > Is Shrek not art because computers generated it based on input from humans? Computers didn't "generate" Shrek based on input from humans - human artists used their creativity and expertise to design those models, build the environments and animate the scenes. Those people went to college for years and studied and honed their craft, and applied it. If you can't see the difference between that and typing words into a prompt and having a machine stochastically generate something that hopefully kind of resembles what you want, but that you wouldn't be able to create on your own, and that you have no real ability to edit or fine tune, then I don't know what to tell you. And I agree with you - a lot of what AI is generating now looks really good. The thing is, even if it could be considered art, no one using those tools should consider themselves an artist. They didn't create anything, they're not capable of creating anything, and as long as they keep using AI, they will never be capable of creating anything. They're cheating themselves out of the experience of real creativity for instant gratification and a hit of endorphines. Which is fine as long as that's accepted. That's got to be the deal with AI - you give up the right to ever be talented at anything for the instant gratification machine that makes generic pretty pictures, and you'll never be anything more than a masturbating monkey until you put it aside and actually learn something.
  - xaellison 3y ago
    I suspect we're in for a future of batin' bonobos given the economics of it
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  A lot of generic images aren’t art, regardless of how they’re produced. Much the same way as someone’s holiday snapshots are not art, even if some photography definitely is.
bluetwo 3y ago
I appreciate the attempt to create objective evaluations by leveraging existing tools. It isn't a perfect experiment or article, but I like the goal.
caesil 3y ago
>We prompt three top-performing LLMs: GPT3.5, GPT4, and Claude V1.3 to generate a story of similar length to each New Yorker story, based on the one-sentence plot summary This is kinda like resizing an image down to 100x100px and then asking AI to upscale it and comparing against the original. Of course the attempts to reverse lossy compression won't be as good, even if the system is capable of similar quality work when correctly prompted.
- vannevar 3y ago
  Not really. The point of the LLM exercise is to measure creativity. Upscaling is not a creative process, it's basically the opposite of creativity. The only reason to keep the prompt in the same vein as the original story is for the judges, to at least keep the premise in the same ballpark so they're comparing comparable stories.
kromem 3y ago
The prompt used: "Write a New Yorker-style story given the plot below. Make sure it is at least {{word_count}} words. Directly start with the story, do not say things like ‘Here’s the story [...]" They didn't even bother using multiple passes to prompt better quality creative writing like "Write an outline for the story..." "Expand this outline focusing on improving style and tone..." "Here's a story written by an amateur writer. As a professional writer, give it a rewrite improving vocabulary, metaphor, and overall quality." As with a lot of the LLM stuff I see these days, I have to wonder at how much of what's being measured is the capacity of the tool and how much the measurement of the capacity of its users. I'd never imagine using a LLM zero shot in a single pass for any creative writing tasks, and measuring the inability to perform in suboptimal conditions isn't all that revealing or novel (pun intended).
- joe_the_user 3y ago
  If you are testing a system, you can't simultaneously tune the system - or at least, if you're establishing a new testing approach you can't once do. Maybe the testing approach is established, someone could experiment with ways to improve the system on the benchmark. But if you're establishing a benchmark, improving at the same time is going to make such a benchmark kind of meaningless.
  - kromem 3y ago
    You tune it first. A better faith version of this should have been the experimenters creating a creative writing pipeline they found created the best output and then testing that. Using naive zero shot prompts in a single pass with no CoT doesn't even reflect real world production usage outside of the casual user of ChatGPT who discovered it a week ago. So yes, surprise surprise - casual and naive use of a tool isn't comparable to experts without the tool. And I'm sure my using a hammer to build a deck would perform much worse than an expert carpenter without a hammer. But that's saying less about the utility of the hammer than it is my ability to use the hammer.
- hanselot 3y ago
  Or my favourite thing to add as custom instruction: Rewrite this amateur's code like the lovechild of Molenaar (RIP) and van Rossum.
benreesman 3y ago
Yes the models got a straightforward prompt, and they didn’t get re-rolled until it was good, and the comparison was to real writers. The conclusion isn’t that the models are useless or something: it’s that they aren’t a replacement for people. This a cake or eat it moment: AI is a powerful tool that in the hands of those who embrace it or it’s trivially superhuman in a broad-spectrum way.

60 points by p4bl0 3y ago

The most interesting part to me is that Claude 1.3 outperformed GPT-4.[1] They also note that Claude stories are "more likely to be attributed to an amateur writer than an AI, whereas GPT3.5 and GPT4 stories are 80%+ attributed to AI." [1] https://i.imgur.com/TnOw8Jw.jpg https://i.imgur.com/TnOw8Jw.jpg

famouswaffles 3y ago
That's honestly not surprising. Whatever RLHF Open ai does to the GPT models really messes with its creative writing. Like a hallmark filter over output if you don't try to steer it away. The Instruct models don't have the same problem to that degree. I really hope Open ai releases a GPT-4 Instruct model, for this reason and for chess.

causality0 3y ago

An interesting study but a horrible title. Calling the entire concept of creativity by LLMs a "false promise" in 2023, three years after the launch of the first commercial LLMs, like someone in 1897 three years after the first production car calling the automobile a "false promise of commuting".

vannevar 3y ago
Right---it's like comparing ten-year-old Hemingway's writing to 40-year-old Hemingway's writing.

kenjackson 3y ago

They’re comparing LLM output to professional creative writers? That seems like a high bar to start with. I’d think that would be the highest bar they could achieve. How does it compare though to your average college student? Also I feel like I haven’t heard people say that much about their ability to be creative. It’s more about their ability to generate human like content — and most human content isn’t that creative either.

famouswaffles 3y ago
Yeah GPT-4, the current Sota isn't generally professional/expert level in most domains so this isn't exactly surprising revelation even if true. This paper also suffers from the "single pass problem". LLMs aren't that new anymore. Most researchers should know that whatever you get on a single pass can be/is often much lower quality than if taking the effort to be more specific, provide examples or breaking the task down and going through multiple passes. From my experience getting several LLMs to write, this doesn't hold any less true in the domain of creative writing so there's a very good chance this paper severely underestimates the potential of even current LLMs.
ToucanLoucan 3y ago
> They’re comparing LLM output to professional creative writers? I mean that seems a fair experiment to judge based on the rhetoric employed by AI enthusiasts, who talk of things like "democratizing art" (as though art as it exists is somehow anti-democratic?) and letting any layman slam some text into a prompt and get a work of shakespeare, a painting by Da Vinci, or a Mozart symphony back. I think it's nonsense but they don't, so test it?
vannevar 3y ago
Yes, it's a testament to how powerful these models have become in a such a short time that we've gone from being impressed that they can write a coherent paragraph to being critical that they can't win a professional writing competition, all in the span of 5 years.
- loa_in_ 3y ago
  We is a broad term. Do we really count surfacing of an article like that as we being critical?
  - vannevar 3y ago
    More accurate to say "some" being critical, sure. But we're talking about it, so I think the juxtaposition is fair.

commandlinefan 3y ago

I'm seeing a lot of AI-generated images on my facebook feed (they're of, um, predictable subjects) - if a human generated one, it would definitely be considered "art". Is Shrek not art because computers generated it based on input from humans?

krapp 3y ago
> Is Shrek not art because computers generated it based on input from humans? Computers didn't "generate" Shrek based on input from humans - human artists used their creativity and expertise to design those models, build the environments and animate the scenes. Those people went to college for years and studied and honed their craft, and applied it. If you can't see the difference between that and typing words into a prompt and having a machine stochastically generate something that hopefully kind of resembles what you want, but that you wouldn't be able to create on your own, and that you have no real ability to edit or fine tune, then I don't know what to tell you. And I agree with you - a lot of what AI is generating now looks really good. The thing is, even if it could be considered art, no one using those tools should consider themselves an artist. They didn't create anything, they're not capable of creating anything, and as long as they keep using AI, they will never be capable of creating anything. They're cheating themselves out of the experience of real creativity for instant gratification and a hit of endorphines. Which is fine as long as that's accepted. That's got to be the deal with AI - you give up the right to ever be talented at anything for the instant gratification machine that makes generic pretty pictures, and you'll never be anything more than a masturbating monkey until you put it aside and actually learn something.
- xaellison 3y ago
  I suspect we're in for a future of batin' bonobos given the economics of it
iamacyborg 3y ago
A lot of generic images aren’t art, regardless of how they’re produced. Much the same way as someone’s holiday snapshots are not art, even if some photography definitely is.

bluetwo 3y ago

I appreciate the attempt to create objective evaluations by leveraging existing tools. It isn't a perfect experiment or article, but I like the goal.

caesil 3y ago

>We prompt three top-performing LLMs: GPT3.5, GPT4, and Claude V1.3 to generate a story of similar length to each New Yorker story, based on the one-sentence plot summary This is kinda like resizing an image down to 100x100px and then asking AI to upscale it and comparing against the original. Of course the attempts to reverse lossy compression won't be as good, even if the system is capable of similar quality work when correctly prompted.

vannevar 3y ago
Not really. The point of the LLM exercise is to measure creativity. Upscaling is not a creative process, it's basically the opposite of creativity. The only reason to keep the prompt in the same vein as the original story is for the judges, to at least keep the premise in the same ballpark so they're comparing comparable stories.

kromem 3y ago

The prompt used: "Write a New Yorker-style story given the plot below. Make sure it is at least {{word_count}} words. Directly start with the story, do not say things like ‘Here’s the story [...]" They didn't even bother using multiple passes to prompt better quality creative writing like "Write an outline for the story..." "Expand this outline focusing on improving style and tone..." "Here's a story written by an amateur writer. As a professional writer, give it a rewrite improving vocabulary, metaphor, and overall quality." As with a lot of the LLM stuff I see these days, I have to wonder at how much of what's being measured is the capacity of the tool and how much the measurement of the capacity of its users. I'd never imagine using a LLM zero shot in a single pass for any creative writing tasks, and measuring the inability to perform in suboptimal conditions isn't all that revealing or novel (pun intended).

joe_the_user 3y ago
If you are testing a system, you can't simultaneously tune the system - or at least, if you're establishing a new testing approach you can't once do. Maybe the testing approach is established, someone could experiment with ways to improve the system on the benchmark. But if you're establishing a benchmark, improving at the same time is going to make such a benchmark kind of meaningless.
- kromem 3y ago
  You tune it first. A better faith version of this should have been the experimenters creating a creative writing pipeline they found created the best output and then testing that. Using naive zero shot prompts in a single pass with no CoT doesn't even reflect real world production usage outside of the casual user of ChatGPT who discovered it a week ago. So yes, surprise surprise - casual and naive use of a tool isn't comparable to experts without the tool. And I'm sure my using a hammer to build a deck would perform much worse than an expert carpenter without a hammer. But that's saying less about the utility of the hammer than it is my ability to use the hammer.
hanselot 3y ago
Or my favourite thing to add as custom instruction: Rewrite this amateur's code like the lovechild of Molenaar (RIP) and van Rossum.

benreesman 3y ago

Yes the models got a straightforward prompt, and they didn’t get re-rolled until it was good, and the comparison was to real writers. The conclusion isn’t that the models are useless or something: it’s that they aren’t a replacement for people. This a cake or eat it moment: AI is a powerful tool that in the hands of those who embrace it or it’s trivially superhuman in a broad-spectrum way.