An AI Apology

I'd been working late into the night on part of a large personal project. It was progressing slowly but steadily since early morning and I was learning tons. (Translation: I was spending more time fixing than creating, trying various approaches to accomplish each step, and discovering clever new ways to make mistakes. You know, the kind where you don't know whether it'll be harder to fix it, or to figure out why it didn't work in the first place.) To be fair, I don't have a lot of experience in this particular area, so I was exploring alternatives and poking at the options that were available. Given the luxury of time, I've found this strategy to provide a far deeper understanding than just getting it right the first time and moving on. 

 

Are You More Creative Than an LLM?

Edited from my comment on a LinkedIn post by Roger Dooley, who I don't know.

Roger wrote about an article in "Nature" that describes Centaur , an LLM that predicts human behavior with uncanny accuracy. It reminded me of another project that's similar, but in an opposite way.

A team of researchers created an interesting experiment that tries to measure one aspect of creativity. From www.datcreativity.com/about:

🙶The Divergent Association Task is a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse solutions to open-ended problems.🙷

So it's sort of like the project Roger described, but in reverse: Instead of asking an LLM to predict human decisions, in a sense it analyzes our ability to be unpredictable. It asks for 10 common nouns, chooses the first 7 that it deems 🙶acceptable,🙷 and estimates how different they are from each other (emphasis added):

🙶The average score is 78, and most people score between 74 and 82. The lowest score was 24 and the highest was 96 in our published sample. Although the scores can theoretically range from 0 to 200, in practice they range from 6 to around 110 after millions of responses online.🙷

For fun, I thought it might be interesting to compare a human's results to a few LLMs'. Guess who won? 😀️

  🤖 Gemini scored 67.98, higher than 5.90% of the people who completed the task.

🤖 ChatGPT scored 79.1, higher than 54.23% of the people who completed the task.

  🧑 I scored 86.8, higher than 91.52% of the people who completed the task.

Given this highly scientific (ha!) sample size of 1, it seems we humans are still better than LLMs at being human. If you choose to take the test, I'd love to know your score—please post it in the comments!

Enjoying the Zen

One of my favorite achievements at Google was my ultimately successful year-long struggle to convince the YouTube TV team to fix the comma splice in their 🙶We'll be right back, enjoy the zen.🙷 [sic] interstitials.

I loved the relaxing scenes, but every time one of them showed on our TV, the neighbors could probably hear a Charlie Brown-esque AAAUUUUGGHH! from our living room.

This went on for months.