The “AI” hype these days is inescapable, particularly with Large Language Models (LLMs) that have impressive ability to create images, generate plausible text, and do everything from answering your tax questions to writing your code for you (of course when it comes to accuracy, caveat emptor)! There’s plenty of controversy about the training of these LLMs, discussed by wiser folks than me. People point out that 1) the training sets are often pure plagiarism, 2) the output of these systems reflect the biases of the training sets, and 3) the aforementioned accuracy problem. There are plenty of places to read about those concerns elsewhere.

Thing that has been bothering me about AI lately is that it is, structurally, something of a mediocrity machine.

To explain this, I first need to describe a particular type of person I’ve encountered numerous times in my career. I’ll do this by focusing on one former boss I had who best exemplified the character of what I call the “Idea Guy.” For the sake of anonymity and convenience I’ll call this prior boss “Steve.” In fact, I took the term “Idea Guy” from Steve, since that’s how he described himself and the captains of industry he admired.

Now, there are some industries and times where a single instance of great luck or skill can make you — for example, if you were an A&R person in the ’70s and you discovered a band that went platinum, or if you were a stock broker and bought a lot of Apple in 2016. In some ways, it’s not unlike betting on horse races. It’s very difficult to differentiate between skill and luck in these circumstances. If there’s repeat performance, and you repeat those successes, that might give some indication. But the world is a noisy, random place, and the conditions for these big wins are only rarely available, even highly skilled people don’t tend to have more than a few big wins.

In any case, Steve was a guy who had had one enormous win (and a string of smaller, less lauded failures which were always someone else’s fault), and was therefore utterly convinced of his own brilliance. He regularly had profound insights into what the world needed, and if he could only get people to implement his visions, he’d change the world. I was hired on as one of the people to implement these visions.

It was a peculiar job. One aspect of being an Idea Guy is that the details are beneath you. And if the details are beneath you, then the people who worried about details were also tremendously inferior to the people who had Ideas. Steve would regularly parade investors through the facility where I worked, and proudly wave his hand over my department. “These are my nerds,” he’d smirk. “They deal with the mundane part of things.”

Let me go on an aside about the “mundane” part for a moment. One of these projects involved a web-based calendar system. Steve had online events that he wanted to enter into the system which would appear to end users. He called me into his office one day to yell at me because one of his friends had looked at a prototype of the system and had been very critical. This friend was a designer who wanted everything to be super minimalist, so he told Steve that the registration form had too many fields: “It should only have three: name, email, and password.” Steve demanded to know why I required other details. I explained that we needed the user’s year of birth because events were age-restricted, and we needed their time zone so we could display the event time to them correctly¹.

Steve flew into a rage. “You nerds always make things so complicated! Get rid of everything but name, email, and password!” I tried to explain again but Steve wouldn’t listen. Eventually, he said “do it my way, or I’ll find someone else who will!” I ended up being reassigned to a different project, and the calendar task was assigned to “Kent²,” a junior programmer. Kent was bright, motivated, and very inexperienced. He came up with some complicated scheme based on a complete misunderstanding of how IP addresses work and the Internet Time Service, built it, and reported to Steve that it was done. Steve smugly announced to me that the problem had been solved — he just had to get “the right nerd on the job.” He pointedly said that if I didn’t learn to listen to him, I’d be replaced by more compliant coders.

The fact is, details matter. Needless to say, the deployment of the site was a disaster, and it wasn’t long before I left Steve’s company.

Most LLM programs are like that junior programmer, “Kent.” They come up with something that looks like a solution. You tell them what you want to solve, and they use pattern matching to find a solution that seems the most similar to problems like the one you’re describing. They don’t have any understanding of what’s going on. If the problem is close enough to one they’ve seen, the solution may well work. But if the problem is significantly different, or the way you describe it is different than other people have described it, you’ll get a solution that looks right … but probably isn’t. You can then correct the LLM, and it’ll apologize, and try again.

Like Kent, the LLM will generate something that looks like it will do what you tell it, whether it makes sense or not. If you’re like Steve, and have contempt for the people who get caught up in details, “AI” is perfect because it won’t argue with you. It’ll just go ahead and come up with something. The kicker is the more that what you’re doing is like stuff that’s been done before, the more likely it is the solution you’re given will work. To say that in a different way: the more original the idea or approach, the less likely the solution will work.

Now, in a lot of cases, the average is a good target. For basic building blocks, using a tried-and-true approach makes sense. A programmer shouldn’t reinvent sorting algorithms every time they want to sort something (which is why there are libraries). And a programmer probably shouldn’t ever invent an encryption algorithm.

Here’s where the Idea Guy jumps in and says “Yes, my brilliant original idea is the key, and the details are mundane so should be handled by nerds who know that sort of thing.” But this requires knowing how to break down the so-called brilliant original idea into the constituent mundane components in order to implement it. It requires understanding details like “I can’t present a time to someone correctly unless I know their time zone.”

Anyway, the more original and novel your idea, the less likely it is that the LLM will be able to put together the details correctly, and the more your idea resembles ideas that have been integrated into the training data, the more likely it is to succeed. So when you have the idea for the Next Great Thing, if your LLM can build it quickly and accurately, it probably means your idea isn’t very original. So you can probably get it to build your “Facebook but for pets” or “DoorDash, but for weed delivery,” but not for … well, I’d best not reveal The Greatest Idea Since Sliced Bread here.

¹This was in the days before you could reliably use JavaScript to detect time zone.

²Not even remotely his real name.

(inspired by a wise Mastodon thread)

It made me think that a lot of people’s real hobby is gatekeeping, but they apply it to different avocations.

Way back in the ’90s I was a member of a photography club. Each month, there would be a competition among members. Pictures were scored from 1-5 on each of three criteria, which were something like technical expertise, aesthetics, and realization of the month’s theme. Everything was highly formalized with rules. Entries could only be recent slides, must comply with very specific labelling requirements, and so on, but the rules didn’t end there. Interpretation of the theme had to be extremely literal. I was lectured about frivolity on more than one occasion when using the theme metaphorically.

In the technical category, there were also a lot of absolutes. Visible grain in an image at normal magnification was an immediate disqualification. Technical points were deducted if there was anything remotely out of focus. Portraits which were allowed to have bokeh — but only if you couldn’t determine how many blades the lens diaphragm had. Furthermore, it was considered a technical flaw to have a portrait where the subject’s nose broke the outline of their face or had more than one reflected light visible in each eye. It wasn’t considered good form to mention make of the camera during the competition itself, but everybody knew who shot Leicas or had Zeiss lenses on their Nikons, and this influenced technical scores accordingly.

But beyond these kinds of rules, one of the old-timers had developed a set of “aesthetic guidelines” which were ruthlessly applied (in retrospect, these may have been born of some form of OCD). Two points would be subtracted from any image’s aesthetic score if there was water breaking the bottom of the frame “because that’s bad composition.” Any image that was brighter near the bottom than the top lost points. Landscapes that were not black and white had to have a person or a horse visible “to create interest.” Pictures of urban or industrial scenes had to be taken in hard daylight, while pictures of nature would lose points for not being taken at the Golden Hour. Pictures of people had to have an even number of eyes visible. Lines always had to lead into the image and never out.

I remember on one occasion, two of the judges arguing about a picture’s aesthetic qualities and one finally taking out a tape measure to confirm that the eye of a seabird was not exactly 33% from two edges of the frame. He triumphantly reduced the picture’s score for violating the “rule of thirds.”

I tried to participate on their terms for a lot longer than I should have. I was routinely chastised for not taking photography seriously because I didn’t study up on the rules. Needless to say, I eventually quit. I’d lost a lot of enthusiasm for photography, and it took a long time to get excited about it again.

I see this as a common thing in “typical guy hobbies” be they photography, cars, phones, motorcycles, programming languages, computers, guitars, knives, operating systems, guns, bicycles, or gaming systems. It often manifests as confusing the gear with the hobby, but also devolves into arguments about X being better than Y. It turns out that arguing in-group / out-group status is more interesting for a lot of folks than the hobby they’re ostensibly enjoying.

“Forget that stuff,” I yell (trying to convince myself and everyone else). Go out and do the thing, use what you’ve got, and enjoy it. That’s the real point, after all.