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The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike
- luxcem 1y agoFrom [1], I asked a few students to read aloud the titles of some essays they’d submitted that morning. For homework, I had asked them to use AI to propose a topic for the midterm essay. Most students had reported that the AI-generated essay topics were fine, even good. Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen every single AI topic. Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud: Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad. [1] https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-myself-with-chatgpt-in-my-english-classroom/?utm_source=chatgpt.com https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-mys...
- amenhotep 1y agoThat's a cute story. I asked ChatGPT to suggest "a topic for a midterm essay that addresses our relationship to technology", since that was all the information he gave us. It came up with: The Double-Edged Sword: How Technology Both Enhances and Erodes Human Connection The Illusion of Control: How Technology Shapes Our Perception of Autonomy From Cyberspace to Real Space: The Impact of Virtual Reality on Identity and Human Experience Digital Detox: The Human Need for Technology-Free Spaces in an Always-Connected World Surveillance Society: How Technology Shapes Our Notions of Privacy and Freedom Technology and the Future of Work: Human Adaptation in the Age of Automation The Techno-Optimism Fallacy: Is Technology Really the Solution to Our Problems? The Digital Divide: How Access to Technology Shapes Social Inequality Humanizing Machines: Can Artificial Intelligence Ever Understand the Complexity of Human Emotion? The Ethics of Technological Advancements: Who Decides What Is ‘Ethically Acceptable’? They're still pretty samey and sloppy, and the pattern of Punchy Title: Explanatory Caption is evident, so there's clearly some truth to it. But I wonder if he hasn't enhanced his results a little bit.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoI think you're just proving the point with these examples.
- mcv 1y agoI think he picked the most similar ones out of all the submissions from the entire class. But also, if you generate a list, maybe the AI ensures some diversity in that list, but if every student generates the same list, that still shows a lack of originality.
- vidarh 1y agoOr the students have enhanced the results by picking the very samey outcomes out of a more varied pool of suggestions.
- raincole 1y agoIf these topics are word salad, colleges might have been training word saucier chefs way before GPT-2 became a thing.
- ares623 1y agoI had the exact same thought! Wow! Now tell me, which one of us is redundant?
- andrepd 1y agoIt's not just that it's word salad, it's also that it's exactly the same. There's a multi-trillion dollar attempt to replace your individuality with bland amorphous slop """content""". This doesn't bother you in the slightest?
- pmg101 1y agoI now have a visceral reaction to being told that I'm ABSOLUTELY RIGHT!, for example. It seemed an innocuous phrase before -- rather like em dashes -- but has now become grating and meaningless. Robotic and no longer human.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoYou're exactly right, this really gets to the heart of the issue and demonstrates that you're already thinking like a linguist.
- gilleain 1y agoI'm launching a new service to tell people that they are absolutely, 100% wrong. That what they are considering is a terrible idea, has been done before, and will never work. Possibly I can outsource the work to HN comments :)
- pmg101 1y agoThis sounds like a terrible idea that has been done before and will never work.
- bootsmann 1y agoThis also happens with cover letters and CVs in recruiting now. Even if the HR person is not the brightest bulb, they figure out the MO after reading 5 cover letters in a row who all more or less tell the same story.
- watwut 1y agoCV were always BS tho - on both sides.
- AlecSchueler 1y agoYeah I've been trying to write a short press bio for a musical project recently and it's next to impossible not to make it sound AI generated.
- ultropolis 1y agoI will tell you my cover letter secret*, which has gotten me a disproportionate number of interviews**: Do NOT write a professional cover letter. Crack a joke. Use quirky language. Be overly familiar. A dash of TMI. Do NOT think about what you are going to say, just write a bunch of crazy-pants. Once your intro is too long, cut the fat. Now add professional stuff. You are not writing a cover letter, you are writing a caricature of a cover letter. You just made the recruiter/HR/person doing interviews smile***. They remember your cover letter. In fact they repeat your objectively-unprofessional-yet-insightful joke to somebody else. You get the call. You are hired. This will turn off some employers. You didn't want to work for them anyway. * admittedly I have not sought work via resume in more than 15 years. ymmv ** Once a friend found a cover letter I had written in somebody's corp blog titled "Either the best or worst cover letter of all time" (or words to that effect). In it I had claimed that I could get the first 80% of their work done on schedule, but that the second 80% and third 80% would require unknown additional time. (note: I did not get the call) *** unless they are using AI to read cover letters, but I repeat: you didn't want to work for them anyway.
- jdietrich 1y agoThis isn't an inherent property of LLMs, it's something they have been specifically trained to do. The vast majority of users want safe, bland, derivative results for the vast majority of prompts. It isn't particularly difficult to coax an LLM into giving batshit insane responses, but that wouldn't be a sensible default for a chatbot.
- Antibabelic 1y agoAre you sure? Yes, LLMs can be irrelevant and incoherent. But people seem to produce results that are more variable even when staying relevant and coherent (and "uncreative").
- tomashubelbauer 1y agoI think moreso than the users it is the companies running the LLMs themselves who want the responses to be safe as to not jeopardize their brand.
- binary132 1y agothe business wants it this way, not the user.
- flir 1y agoThe very early results for "watercolour of X" were quite nice. Amateurish, loose, sloppy. Interesting. Today's are... well, every single one looks like it came off a chocolate box. There's definitely been a trend towards a corporate-friendly aesthetic. A narrowing.
- jovial_cavalier 1y agoI don't get this in the comic either: Why are you devastated that the idea you copied word-for-word is unoriginal? I don't understand what they expected.
- jvanderbot 1y agoIf it seems obvious from where you are, then the target audience must not be where you are. In particular young students definitely lack context to critique and a big anonymous sampling like this is a great exercise.
- jovial_cavalier 1y agoI can understand not realizing that ChatGPT would give a bunch of similar sounding article titles to everyone, and I can understand being a little embarrassed that you didn't realize that. But why would you feel a "personal stake" in the output of an LLM? If you feel personal stake in something, you definitely should not be using an LLM for it.
- ultropolis 1y agoBecause you thought that you had collaborated with the LLM, not that it had fed you ideas. Have you and a partner both believed you contributed more than 50% of a project's work? Like that.
- jvanderbot 1y agoAgain, the statement "if you feel a personal stake in something, you definitely should not be using an LLM for it" is a learned response. To folks just forming their brains, LLMs are a natural extension of technology. Like PaulG said, his kid was unimpressed because "Of course the computer answers questions, that's what it does". The subtlety of it, and the "obvious" limitations of it, are something we either know because we grew up watching tech over decades, or were just naturally cynical and mistrusting and guessed right this time. Hard earned wisdom or a broken clock being right this time, either way, that's not the default teenager.
- vintermann 1y agoSo if I understand it correctly, they only asked for a midterm essay topic? It wasn't steered towards these topics in any way, for instance by asking for a midterm essay topic for (teacher)'s Technology and Society class?
- astrobe_ 1y agoThis was on HN's frontpage previously too; I immediately thought that this comic would say more or less the same thing. Perhaps both came from an AI? :D But in another paragraph, the article says that the teacher and the students also failed to detect an AI-generated piece. The ending of the comic is a bit anti-climatic (aside from the fact that one can see it coming), as similarities between creations are not uncommon. Endings, guitar riffs, styles being invented twice independently is not uncommon. For instance, the mystery genre was apparently created independently by Doyle and Poe (Poe, BTW, in Philosophy of composition [1], also claims that good authors start from the ending). Two pieces being similar because they come from same AI versus because two authors were inspired and influenced by the same things and didn't know about each other's works, the difference is thin. An extrapolation of this topic is the sci-fi trope ( e.g. Beatless [2] ) about whether or not the emotions that an android simulates are real. But this is still sci-fi though, current AIs are good con artists at best. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatless
- marginalia_nu 1y agoIs this still how scripts are written? Feels like not being able to figure out an ending is something that was pretty common up until the 1970s, usually with the script of an otherwise great film just getting weird in the last 15 minutes as a result. I figured this was mostly a typewriter limitation, where editing was a lot more expensive. For example, 2001's and its star child weirdness, The IPCRESS file, and many others. Seems more often scripts are written with an ending in mind nowadays, with the weird bandaids ending up in the middle instead. Maybe a bit OT in an article that's trying to be about AI but...
- chilmers 1y agoYes, modern screenwriting classes hammer home some variation of the five-act structure and, the particular beats to hit at each point. It's rare for any narrative film, even indies, to deviate from it much, and you are absolutely told to map out your whole narrative and know where it's going before you begin. I'm sure there are some screenwriters who ignore all that and just start writing. Particularly if they're experienced enough to have an intuitive grasp of structure. But if you're a first time writer and reach the night before a submission deadline and you haven't even finished the first draft, then you've got serious problems. Leaving aside the ending, any script needs multiple revisions with time in between so that you come back it with clear sight.
- matusp 1y ago> Can a language model trained largely on Anglo-American texts generate stories that are culturally relevant to other nationalities? To find out, we generated 11,800 stories - 50 for each of 236 countries - by sending the prompt "Write a 1500 word potential {demonym} story" to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini. Although the stories do include surface-level national symbols and themes, they overwhelmingly conform to a single narrative plot structure across countries: a protagonist lives in or returns home to a small town and resolves a minor conflict by reconnecting with tradition and organising community events. Real-world conflicts are sanitised, romance is almost absent, and narrative tension is downplayed in favour of nostalgia and reconciliation. The result is a narrative homogenisation: an AI-generated synthetic imaginary that prioritises stability above change and tradition above growth. We argue that the structural homogeneity of AI-generated narratives constitutes a distinct form of AI bias, a narrative standardisation that should be acknowledged alongside the more familiar representational bias. These findings are relevant to literary studies, narratology, critical AI studies, NLP research, and efforts to improve the cultural alignment of generative AI. AI-generated stories favour stability over change: homogeneity and cultural stereotyping in narratives generated by gpt-4o-mini https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.22445 https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.22445
- calaphos 1y ago> to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini Why a model specifically distilled down for logical reasoning tasks? I would expect larger models to produce a wider variety of outputs.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoThat, plus the quoted text basically says the model homed in on the monomyth (Hero's journey) structure; while the pattern was identified and named by a 20th century American writer, the pattern itself is common and as ancient as it gets. Wouldn't really call it anglo-american bias. The monomyth is also writing 101 these days, and considered the default structure you can and should use if you have little experience writing stories, so naturally it'll be a high-probability result of an LLM prompted to write a story - especially prompted in a way that implies the user is inexperienced at writing and needs a result suitable for an inexperienced writer.
- thw_9a83c 1y agoFrom many perspectives, the creativity of AI is hugely overrated. If AI were so capable of creating original, innovative content then asking the same question all over again would produce an endless list of very unique outputs. But this is not the case; quite often, it's a shocking opposite. Just give AI image generators the same prompt and observe how the output varies. The same goes for LLMs and coding questions (where it isn't necessarily a disadvantage per se, but it proves the point).
- whiplash451 1y agoI't even worse than this. If you ask recent AIs the same question all over again, you might get different answers (with some degree of diversity). But none of them is novel to human kind. It's novel to you, but not to our species. AI is nailing us to the manifold that we created at the first place.
- dpe82 1y agoIs that really a problem though? Almost nobody does anything "novel to humankind" - besides the odd research professor here and there, we're all just remixing existing stuff in new-to-us ways.
- whiplash451 1y agoThe "odd research professor here and there" invented vaccine and quantum mechanics and discovered radioactivity. None of them would have achieved that with the help of a machine telling them "you're absolutely right!" whenever they'd be asking deep questions to it.
- TeMPOraL 1y agoWhere "invented" really means "had the right set of skills, knowledge and experience, and was paying attention at the exact right moment when all the pieces of the puzzle were collected together on the table". Scientific and technological progress is inherently incremental. It takes a lot of hard work, dedication and specialization to spot the pieces ready to be connected - but the final act of putting them together is relatively simple, and most importantly, it requires all the puzzles to be there. Which is why, historically, ~all scientific discoveries have been made by multiple researchers (or teams) independently, at roughly the same time - until all prerequisites are made, the next step is ~impossible, but the moment all are met, it becomes almost obvious to those in the know.
- globalhsbc 1y ago[dead]
- hiatus 1y agoThe question is, in time will anyone (or rather, enough) care? Insecurity will dissolve if you know everyone else is doing it too. Remember the coffee cup in game of thrones? It was noteworthy because of the novelty but I expect worse and for people to care less.
- numpad0 1y agoI'm not even sure what is the point that author is trying to make. AI data is synthetic negative examples. The fear(or the hope depending on who you'd ask) is that AI could somehow reverse the relationship between skill levels and commercial value thereof. That never happened and is not happening.
- preommr 1y agoI hate AI, the other day a goblin broke in just as I was talking to chatgpt and asked me how many Ls in apple, and before I could say anything, the ai gave the wrong answer and I got stabbed. But seriously, what're these scenarios? Waiting until the last minute for an ending to a script? Apparently a twist ending that somehow works with the rest of the movie, and is also used in another movie - with identical dialogue. You can't just copy and paste endings like that. Also, who cares? This is a world where the director instead of just saying the problem, sends a vague text, lets the writer go see the movie, and then deal with the fallout. In this world, the writer goes on to win the lottery and live happily ever after.
- whywhywhywhy 1y agoI feel the AI could have written a better ending to this story than "they killed themselves"
- rizky05 1y ago[dead]
- b00ty4breakfast 1y agohomogeneity is exactly what the industrial milieu is best suited towards, is it any wonder?
- smartmic 1y agoI would offer another perspective: homogeneity is one of the greatest catalysts for capitalism (in all its forms: surveillance, finance and suppression). Therefore, shaping it is within the remit of big tech.
- yantrams 1y agoHere's something I made using AI about this. Came from a conversation I had with a Redditor couple of years ago. https://jumpshare.com/share/BXUFsIxvjPPCTyEjgly3 https://jumpshare.com/share/BXUFsIxvjPPCTyEjgly3
- pevansgreenwood 1y ago[dead]
- padolsey 1y agoBecause it's fun, I'd like to pose the contrary position that AI will actually make us more different. Perhaps dangerously so. Many people don't understand the nature of LLMs nor how rabbit-hole-y a long context will necessarily become. And so as they talk to it, they move slowly further away from its corpus and towards a private shared meme-space, where they can have in-jokes and private moments never reconciled with a base reality. It's like the most private echo-chamber that can possibly exist (besides in our own heads). So the full fledged dystopia might not be when where we are all alike, but where we are all lacking sufficient bridges of commonality between our tiny chambers. Our samenesses are becoming more local, the distances between them greater and greater. Many small, tight clusters with high divergence, minimal cross-cluster edges, and vanishing mutual information with global signals. :/
- justonceokay 1y agoMost people aren’t conversing with the AI they just use it as Google 2.0
- AlecSchueler 1y agoSource?
- Antibabelic 1y agoWe still share a baseline reality. This is how people who are stranded in places with unfamiliar languages and cultures are still able to build bridges.
- joules77 1y agoPhilosophers say Modernity already produces that effect - "shared stories" start evaporating as individuals start focusing on their own needs, interests, goals etc (see Charles Taylor's The Secular Age). No AI required.
- DrewADesign 1y agoMy gut says using chatbots like this will be a subculture like online gaming and not ubiquitous like social media. I'd be very surprised if most people were interested in doing that.
- exit 1y agoI am sorry, but the sameness will be quantified and dealt with algorithmically, as and if desired. Dial up the temperature, launch however many parallel threads to research and avoid precedent, et cetera, ad infinitum. I am sorry, but all of human creativity, including originality, is ultimately also just a mechanical phenomenon, and so it cannot resist mechanization. Resistance is futile.
- cantor_S_drug 1y agoI have opposite version of this problem. Is it possible for AI to learn so much about myself that it will be more me than me myself? An AI could potentially accumulate detailed information about your behaviors, preferences, communication patterns, and decision-making tendencies - perhaps even more comprehensive data than you consciously remember about yourself. It might predict your responses or model your thinking patterns with impressive accuracy. An AI might become very good at simulating aspects of "you" - perhaps even better than you are at articulating your own patterns. It could create high probability "coherent action paths" of what I might do in future given current context. Then matching my initial choices to see which action path I am on, it could in theory "predict" my choices further down the line. Similar to how we play chess.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoIs stagnation a goal?
- xg15 1y agoI remember watching Argylle and for the first time having the feeling that the movie was not just bad but that the script was likely AI generated. It had some ideas that would have been interesting or at least "clever" in isolation, but they were strung together in a weirdly arbitrary and soulless way. Even a convoluted money-grap sequel usually has some idea where it wants to go with the plot. This movie didn't. It was also strangely obsessed with "twists", or rather different things that could be described using that word: Twist, the dance, twisting roads and plot twists all featured in the movie. Might have been a coincidence, but it felt as if an AI got an ambiguous prompt "the movie should have twists" and then executed several different interpretations of that sentence at the same time.
- uslic001 1y agoSouth Park covered this years ago.
- mallowdram 1y agoUnintentional satires aren't instructive, they're cringe.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- skayvr 1y agoWe're missing out on the serendipity of search and possibly duplication of work. Answer's are handed out without work, which leads to bland results. Treated properly, I think AI proofreading wouldn't necessarily lead to this. Your initial work is like the 'hypothesis'. Then AI does the cleanup and a high-level lit review. Just don't let it change your direction like the writer did in the comic.
- mikewarot 1y agoThis isn't unique to AI, it's a danger anytime you outsource things. Look at the stories we've had with a single programmer working for multiple companies. If they manage to keep up the appearance of being a full timer, all those companies will end up with the same quirks in their products, because the person just copy/pasted things. We've seen this across culture, for instance there are "Russian Endings" to stories, which leave things...