The Disappointment with Generative AI...is Hilariously Human

A visually assisted essay on trust and intelligence, artificial, human, and otherwise

Welcome to the Frontier Psychiatrists newsletter. I'm on vacation, and knocked this out on my phone. Subscribe anyway! It not substantial today…but I hope, timely and fun.

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We expected generative AI to do remarkable things. We expected that because humans tend to expect new things to be awesome. Humans are not, on average, awesome. That is how averages work. It takes the outliers, and it rounds them down. If you are training a model on humans, and you take out the thing that some humans are really good at—having some ability to distinguish nonsense from not too much nonsense—you will get a very brutal regression to the mean. At best, you're going to be presented with the average of what we think, with some guard rails…