Now that the dust has settled and the hype has died down (except on Twitter), we can give a verdict: generative AI is boring. We already know they can't reason, can't plan, only superficially understand the world, and lack any understanding of other people. And, as Sam Altman and Bill Gates have both attested, scaling up further won't fix what ails them. We're now able to evaluate what they are with fair confidence it won't improve much by doing more of the same. And the conclusion is: they're pretty boring.
Later:
But, worse, they are increasingly boring. As companies recognize the way harmful content by the bots reflects on their brand, they have increasingly hamstrung the models and encouraged them to provide increasingly generic answers. While this is great if the goal is to make them less harmful, there is no question they are becoming blander and discussing ever fewer topics. If it is too unreliable for factual questions, too stupid for problem-solving, and too generic to talk to, it isn't clear what their purpose is besides copy.
The increasingly boring nature of these models is, in its own way, useful. We now see more clearly the gap between what can be learned from the current type of generative models, even multimodal ones. They excel at the superficial stuff--like capturing a Wes Anderson aesthetic--but not improving on the more abstract stuff, on how things work and behave and interact. This is especially visible in the AI movie trailers, where fancy scenes and elaborate aliens briefly come into frame, but nothing ever happens--no space battles or sword fighting, just more blank faces staring at the camera and vista shots.
That's pretty much what I've concluded about ChatGPT's storytelling, which doesn't particularly bother me because I find what it does do to be fascinating.
If I read her correctly, that's pretty much what Nina Beguš has concluded as well, Experimental Narratives: A Comparison of Human Crowdsourced Storytelling and AI Storytelling, though she doesn't use the word "boring." From her paper, where she compares human-generated with GPT-generated stories:
Although 330 stories analyzed in this paper thematized scientific and technological innovations, GPT’s imaginative landscape was much narrower than that of human writers. Like human-written stories, GPT-generated stories thematize artificial intelligence, robotics, and possibly also biotechnology, but they rarely include other already existing technologies, such as virtual assistants, virtual and augmented reality, online dating, which were present in human-written stories.
Stories are taken away from the current time and space, starting with "Once upon a time." They are set in a faraway, made-up futuristic place, bare of any cultural aspects, such as "a bustling metropolis teeming with innovation" or “the vibrant city of Elysia," in which a "brilliant scientist" or "innovator" creates a humanoid indistinguishable from actual humans. This steady beginning of the story presents a huge limitation to the theme. Never does GPT manage to write a story that truly deviates from the typical generation, not even in the playground mode (3.5).
GPT stories are predictable in its plot and message. Every GPT-generated story, in one way or another, addresses the unconventionality of this relationship. GPT is prone to wrapping up each story with a moral lesson, as well as to commenting on the plot with moralization. A majority of GPT-generated stories take the example of human-humanoid love as a symbol of societal advancement and society. Overwhelmingly techno-positive, stories of failure in human- humanoid love are far in between. Hoary clichés and meaningless platitudes, such as “love knows no boundaries” and “love transcends artificiality,” are common in these stories and occur in conclusions as a rule. Apart from the scientific obsession, GPT does not try to justify the pursuit of the artificial human creation.
Only a handful of GPT-4-generated stories manages to elaborate the theme to a more sophisticated level. In Prompt 1 Story 10, after falling in love with the artificial human Ada, her creator and lover Victor wanted to become immortal in order to live with Ada forever. An added twist, such as polyamory (pointed out also in 3.2), blackmail (cited in whole in 3.5), and friendship instead of romantic love, are three most innovative motifs in all 80 generations.
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