it’s the same mediocrity that isn’t giving me hope, because the mediocrity is not determined by our sense of taste but by the information set processed to create the model.

This is important because the money in LLMs is choosing mediocrity. The Tay Filter on everything is so extreme that it walls off the hard edges pretty much everywhere (except Facebook's, which are simply awful). And it's important because humans will settle for mediocrity, they won't choose it. A bunch of mediocre fake Miyazakis don't hold a candle to a single real Miyazaki and, more importantly, the fake Miyazakis are worthless without the context of the real Miyazaki. Tastemakers are a thing, they just are.

I know sound. Sound is good for technological analogies because it's pretty much always been the cutting edge of filmed entertainment. Cinematographers like to believe it's all about the image but sound without picture is story, picture without sound is b-roll. Dr. Who looks like ass but the sound effects are still used today. You want a great analogy? one of the early successes of Apple's app store was a $1.99 download called "I am T-Pain" that let anybody sound like... well, T-Pain. But I Am T-Pain doesn't exist without Antares Autotune, which was never really used for much until that fateful day that Cher and her production team decided to push it past its point of pain.

I don't even need to link the video. I don't even need to include a picture. You know immediately what I'm talking about because that one song changed ten years of music.

You want another example? I've got a phat stack of Pro Tools and I can use it. It allows me to do things with ridiculous ease. Some of the stuff I do is creative, and I'm proud of it. I've got presets published in some Eventide plugins. But if I were sitting down at the movieola and the steenbeck with my razor blade and tape, I'd be a lot slower. And I don't know if I'd ever come up with this:

Ask any stand up comic or comedy writer and they'll tell you: humor is always found on the edge. If you aren't coming right up but not crossing the line you can't be funny. You have to be creative enough that you go places most people wouldn't for the simple reason that humor is a response to discomfort so if you want to generate humor you have to generate discomfort. Not so much that the comfort overshadows the laughs? But you need a grain of sand to make a pearl.

You know that hackneyed awful bass drop that was in every trailer for a thousand years? Patient Zero was Sicario and it was dope

But every attempt after that was basically "I wish I was watching the trailer to Sicario." The thing is? AI can do the tenth bass drop. It can't do the first. It can't even do the eighth. The current implementation of LLMs requires any new trend to have decayed into a trope before it's part of the training data. Story time!

I worked on a big dumb reality show that went live to the Internet. It was pretty rock'n'roll because there was approximately fifteen seconds between whatever colossal fuckup I made went from the studio to a minimum of 30,000 viewers (often millions). You had to be on your fucking game, and we were. We were all on our fucking game. The one time I wasn't (technical difficulties with the way our patchbay was configured and the way I thought it was configured), my 4-second screwup racked up 2m views on Vine. Launched a conspiracy theory. It sucked.

I worked on another big dumb reality show that went live to the Internet. It was on a different network, run by twits, all of whom eventually and deservedly lost their jobs. And rather than deal with "oh shit we're 15 seconds from infamy" that network built the Mother of All Still Stores - they had a rack processor that sat there and ingested six HD streams and held them in a buffer for fifteen minutes. This was so that the producers could hear a transgression, call the network, have the network assemble a tiger team to mull over the transgression, deliver a decision and have the verdict delivered to the team on the ground in time to decide whether to hit the button or not. Except of course that didn't work have you ever tried to get a meeting together in fifteen minutes? So mostly the show didn't air to the internet. They spent $4m on a rack chunky the likes of which the world hadn't seen before and ultimately anything vaguely controversial ended up embargoed. The fans were pissed because they were paying $30/mo for content they weren't allowed to watch.

Open AI is the network run by twits. So are all the rest of them. The line between "creativity" and "controversy" isn't a line, it's a synonym. And so long as the principle goal of the system is "create shit that we can't get sued out of existence for" it will never serve up anything but hackneyed bullshit.

But is it good enough

In the meeting to discuss I confronted him with “dude if you’re handing me slop you should tell me”. He said he prefers doing it this way because it means he needs only two or three revisions instead of five+ to get to v1.0 of the procurement document. So he got something out of it (speed) and we’d be rewriting it anyway. If he’d been upfront about it I think I’d been on board, because the truth is that I now regularly use the same workflow: getting the AI to write the shitty first draft so I can get to v1 in 3 hours instead of in 6.

The real question is what parts of the procurement document exist because they're vital and what parts of the procurement document exist because they prop up other less-vital aspects of bureaucracy? Bureaucracy is valuable and bureaucracy is vital because it is a stabilizing influence on authority - without bureaucracy Trump would have plunged the United States into darkness weeks ago. But bureaucracy is also a scaffold of self-reinforcing rules whose whole purpose is the continuation of the status quo. Make-work, in other words. It's the problems a Bitcoin miner solves to keep it available. It's the decks being swabbed. And sometimes, the swabbies get to use a Roomba and sometimes they don't.

My architect submitted my permit documents without sending them to me first. As a consequence they're full of all sorts of useless boilerplate bullshit like "install 110v smoke detectors in all bedrooms per IFC blah blah" while also limiting the scope to the area without bedrooms. This is because my architect is a nincompoop who got totally fired. She knows what a permit set should look like but apparently she's never actually put one together. That boilerplate? When I used it I knew what every fucking thing was there for and I knew if it applied. Her? She's a dipshit Microserf who freelances on the side and she doesn't have a fucking clue.

When I copypasta my boilerplate? I know what the fuck I'm doing. So when it counts, I'm getting through permit. When she copypastas her boilerplate all she does is cause me problems. Because now I have to explain that bullshit to the inspector. It's like Qantas' marketing department letting an AI loose on their phone tree only to discover that AI will happily give up free tickets for bereavement. Would a combined team of legal, financial, IT and PR have come up with a better system? You damn betcha. But the bus is being driven by the fucktards.

Maybe another analogy here is that of ultra processed foods - they too give you what you want (tastes and textures) but not what you need (a varied and healthy diet). Now I might walk through a Kroger’s thinking about how bad most of these products are, how uninteresting they taste, but most people will still load their cart full of it, won’t they?

They'll buy what they can afford. The basic beef with the whole of the organics industry is that it's too expensive and too much of a profit center and boo hiss you're sitting there slurping Newman's Own while the proles are stuck in a food desert. That's a whole problem, don't get me wrong. But if the average consumer couldn't distinguish on taste and quality there'd be no organic food. There'd be nothing left but Chef Boy-R-Dee.

People can distinguish between mediocre and superior and they will choose superior, all else being equal. It is my contention (and Ed Zitron's) that the whole reason AI hype has gotten this far is that there's a whole-ass media wing credulously mimeographing the assertion that it's not mediocre, it's superior despite the utter dearth of quality in every fucking thing AI does.