Novelty is easy, quality is hard

I am often surprised when people claim that “AI can’t make anything truly new”. I think making new things is very easy

Let’s try generating some novel text:

fHabBiCcABnqjSAIysqcyJAnCTWCIk

That’s very novel. I used Python to produce random letters:

import random
import string

print(''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for _ in range(20)))

import random
import string

print(''.join(random.choice(string.ascii_letters) for _ in range(20)))

Oh, but those aren’t even words, you say? OK, let’s try again:

anthocyan Delhi iliococcygian methodologically opah reapparel pretimely humoristic Jingbai specks

This was made by randomly selecting words from my system dictionary.

import random
import pathlib

words = pathlib.Path('/usr/share/dict/words').read_text().splitlines()
print(' '.join(random.choice(words) for _ in range(10)))

import random
import pathlib

words = pathlib.Path('/usr/share/dict/words').read_text().splitlines()
print(' '.join(random.choice(words) for _ in range(10)))

Very novel. I now hear someone say that this is not a well-formed English sentence.

We now stand at a crossroads. We can enforce the structure of a sentence (something like “the <noun> <verb>ed the <noun>”) or we could work statistically off some corpus with simple Markov chains. These simple Markov processes can generate some surprisingly readable text (without using any rules about the english language). Here’s a snippet that was on top of the kingjamesprogramming tumblr site when I went there. This was generated by a Markov process trained on the King James bible and “The structure and interpretation of computer programs“.

then shall they call upon me, but I will not cause any information to be accumulated on the stack.

I’m pretty sure that’s a novel thought. But we’re starting to get to what people would perhaps agree is a sentence but start objecting to more on semantic grounds. Does this sentence mean anything? Is it true?

If we go down the “The noun verbed the noun” route, we end up with a slightly different feeling. A feeling of “sameness”. I think often this is what people react to when they spend a bit of time conversing with ChatGPT. It’s not the novelty of the words or even ideas they’re responding to, it’s more the sameness of the vibe. Something that in people could be called their writing voice.

This is a very deep concept, but can also be circumvented by leaning harder into randomness. In the GPT API, you can increase the parameter called “temperature” to get some more “out there” combinations.

In the end we’re back to the same thing: It’s not the novelty that’s the problem. It’s the quality.