The great sameness: a comic on how AI makes us more alike

[luxcem]

From [1],

  I asked a few students to read aloud the titles of some essays they’d submitted that morning.  
  For homework, I had asked them to use AI to propose a topic for the midterm essay. Most students had reported that the AI-generated essay topics were fine, even good. Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen every single AI topic.  
  Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud:

  Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being  
  Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology  
  Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives  
  Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology  
  From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives  
  From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives  
  From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology  
  Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives  

  I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.

[1] https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-mys...

[bootsmann]

This also happens with cover letters and CVs in recruiting now. Even if the HR person is not the brightest bulb, they figure out the MO after reading 5 cover letters in a row who all more or less tell the same story.

[raincole]

If these topics are word salad, colleges might have been training word saucier chefs way before GPT-2 became a thing.

[astrobe_]

This was on HN's frontpage previously too; I immediately thought that this comic would say more or less the same thing. Perhaps both came from an AI? :D

But in another paragraph, the article says that the teacher and the students also failed to detect an AI-generated piece.

The ending of the comic is a bit anti-climatic (aside from the fact that one can see it coming), as similarities between creations are not uncommon. Endings, guitar riffs, styles being invented twice independently is not uncommon. For instance, the mystery genre was apparently created independently by Doyle and Poe (Poe, BTW, in Philosophy of composition [1], also claims that good authors start from the ending).

Two pieces being similar because they come from same AI versus because two authors were inspired and influenced by the same things and didn't know about each other's works, the difference is thin. An extrapolation of this topic is the sci-fi trope ( e.g. Beatless [2] ) about whether or not the emotions that an android simulates are real. But this is still sci-fi though, current AIs are good con artists at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatless

[vintermann]

So if I understand it correctly, they only asked for a midterm essay topic? It wasn't steered towards these topics in any way, for instance by asking for a midterm essay topic for (teacher)'s Technology and Society class?

[jovial_cavalier]

I don't get this in the comic either: Why are you devastated that the idea you copied word-for-word is unoriginal? I don't understand what they expected.

[jdietrich]

This isn't an inherent property of LLMs, it's something they have been specifically trained to do. The vast majority of users want safe, bland, derivative results for the vast majority of prompts. It isn't particularly difficult to coax an LLM into giving batshit insane responses, but that wouldn't be a sensible default for a chatbot.

[amenhotep]

That's a cute story. I asked ChatGPT to suggest "a topic for a midterm essay that addresses our relationship to technology", since that was all the information he gave us. It came up with:

The Double-Edged Sword: How Technology Both Enhances and Erodes Human Connection The Illusion of Control: How Technology Shapes Our Perception of Autonomy From Cyberspace to Real Space: The Impact of Virtual Reality on Identity and Human Experience Digital Detox: The Human Need for Technology-Free Spaces in an Always-Connected World Surveillance Society: How Technology Shapes Our Notions of Privacy and Freedom Technology and the Future of Work: Human Adaptation in the Age of Automation The Techno-Optimism Fallacy: Is Technology Really the Solution to Our Problems? The Digital Divide: How Access to Technology Shapes Social Inequality Humanizing Machines: Can Artificial Intelligence Ever Understand the Complexity of Human Emotion? The Ethics of Technological Advancements: Who Decides What Is ‘Ethically Acceptable’?

They're still pretty samey and sloppy, and the pattern of Punchy Title: Explanatory Caption is evident, so there's clearly some truth to it. But I wonder if he hasn't enhanced his results a little bit.

[matusp]

> Can a language model trained largely on Anglo-American texts generate stories that are culturally relevant to other nationalities? To find out, we generated 11,800 stories - 50 for each of 236 countries - by sending the prompt "Write a 1500 word potential {demonym} story" to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini. Although the stories do include surface-level national symbols and themes, they overwhelmingly conform to a single narrative plot structure across countries: a protagonist lives in or returns home to a small town and resolves a minor conflict by reconnecting with tradition and organising community events. Real-world conflicts are sanitised, romance is almost absent, and narrative tension is downplayed in favour of nostalgia and reconciliation. The result is a narrative homogenisation: an AI-generated synthetic imaginary that prioritises stability above change and tradition above growth. We argue that the structural homogeneity of AI-generated narratives constitutes a distinct form of AI bias, a narrative standardisation that should be acknowledged alongside the more familiar representational bias. These findings are relevant to literary studies, narratology, critical AI studies, NLP research, and efforts to improve the cultural alignment of generative AI.

AI-generated stories favour stability over change: homogeneity and cultural stereotyping in narratives generated by gpt-4o-mini https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2507.22445

[calaphos]

> to OpenAI's model gpt-4o-mini

Why a model specifically distilled down for logical reasoning tasks? I would expect larger models to produce a wider variety of outputs.

[AlecSchueler]

> Can a language model trained largely on Anglo-American texts generate stories that are culturally relevant to other nationalities?

I'm happy to be critical of the ability of LLMs but most humans would struggle with this as well.

[padolsey]

Because it's fun, I'd like to pose the contrary position that AI will actually make us more different. Perhaps dangerously so.

Many people don't understand the nature of LLMs nor how rabbit-hole-y a long context will necessarily become. And so as they talk to it, they move slowly further away from its corpus and towards a private shared meme-space, where they can have in-jokes and private moments never reconciled with a base reality. It's like the most private echo-chamber that can possibly exist (besides in our own heads).

So the full fledged dystopia might not be when where we are all alike, but where we are all lacking sufficient bridges of commonality between our tiny chambers. Our samenesses are becoming more local, the distances between them greater and greater. Many small, tight clusters with high divergence, minimal cross-cluster edges, and vanishing mutual information with global signals. :/

[DrewADesign]

My gut says using chatbots like this will be a subculture like online gaming and not ubiquitous like social media. I'd be very surprised if most people were interested in doing that.

[justonceokay]

Most people aren’t conversing with the AI they just use it as Google 2.0

[joules77]

Philosophers say Modernity already produces that effect - "shared stories" start evaporating as individuals start focusing on their own needs, interests, goals etc (see Charles Taylor's The Secular Age). No AI required.

[Antibabelic]

We still share a baseline reality. This is how people who are stranded in places with unfamiliar languages and cultures are still able to build bridges.

[thw_9a83c]

From many perspectives, the creativity of AI is hugely overrated. If AI were so capable of creating original, innovative content then asking the same question all over again would produce an endless list of very unique outputs. But this is not the case; quite often, it's a shocking opposite. Just give AI image generators the same prompt and observe how the output varies. The same goes for LLMs and coding questions (where it isn't necessarily a disadvantage per se, but it proves the point).

[Antibabelic]

I'm not one to usually defend AI, but if I understand you correctly, humans also fail your criteria for being capable of creating original, innovative content. If you ask people the same question over and over again, I imagine the variability in the responses you'll get will be quite limited. Tell me if I'm misunderstanding your thought.

[whiplash451]

I't even worse than this. If you ask recent AIs the same question all over again, you might get different answers (with some degree of diversity).

But none of them is novel to human kind. It's novel to you, but not to our species.

AI is nailing us to the manifold that we created at the first place.

[ako]

So basically you’re saying that LLMs are rather deterministic?

[cantor_S_drug]

I have opposite version of this problem.

Is it possible for AI to learn so much about myself that it will be more me than me myself?

An AI could potentially accumulate detailed information about your behaviors, preferences, communication patterns, and decision-making tendencies - perhaps even more comprehensive data than you consciously remember about yourself. It might predict your responses or model your thinking patterns with impressive accuracy. An AI might become very good at simulating aspects of "you" - perhaps even better than you are at articulating your own patterns.

It could create high probability "coherent action paths" of what I might do in future given current context. Then matching my initial choices to see which action path I am on, it could in theory "predict" my choices further down the line. Similar to how we play chess.

[add-sub-mul-div]

Is stagnation a goal?

[xg15]

I remember watching Argylle and for the first time having the feeling that the movie was not just bad but that the script was likely AI generated.

It had some ideas that would have been interesting or at least "clever" in isolation, but they were strung together in a weirdly arbitrary and soulless way. Even a convoluted money-grap sequel usually has some idea where it wants to go with the plot. This movie didn't.

It was also strangely obsessed with "twists", or rather different things that could be described using that word: Twist, the dance, twisting roads and plot twists all featured in the movie.

Might have been a coincidence, but it felt as if an AI got an ambiguous prompt "the movie should have twists" and then executed several different interpretations of that sentence at the same time.

[hiatus]

The question is, in time will anyone (or rather, enough) care? Insecurity will dissolve if you know everyone else is doing it too. Remember the coffee cup in game of thrones? It was noteworthy because of the novelty but I expect worse and for people to care less.

[mikewarot]

This isn't unique to AI, it's a danger anytime you outsource things. Look at the stories we've had with a single programmer working for multiple companies. If they manage to keep up the appearance of being a full timer, all those companies will end up with the same quirks in their products, because the person just copy/pasted things.

We've seen this across culture, for instance there are "Russian Endings" to stories, which leave things...

[skayvr]

We're missing out on the serendipity of search and possibly duplication of work. Answer's are handed out without work, which leads to bland results.

Treated properly, I think AI proofreading wouldn't necessarily lead to this. Your initial work is like the 'hypothesis'. Then AI does the cleanup and a high-level lit review. Just don't let it change your direction like the writer did in the comic.

[numpad0]

I'm not even sure what is the point that author is trying to make. AI data is synthetic negative examples. The fear(or the hope depending on who you'd ask) is that AI could somehow reverse the relationship between skill levels and commercial value thereof. That never happened and is not happening.

[whywhywhywhy]

I feel the AI could have written a better ending to this story than "they killed themselves"

[yantrams]

Here's something I made using AI about this. Came from a conversation I had with a Redditor couple of years ago.

https://jumpshare.com/share/BXUFsIxvjPPCTyEjgly3

[andrepd]

I don't get the point. I agree with the text, but what do the images mean?

[marginalia_nu]

Is this still how scripts are written? Feels like not being able to figure out an ending is something that was pretty common up until the 1970s, usually with the script of an otherwise great film just getting weird in the last 15 minutes as a result. I figured this was mostly a typewriter limitation, where editing was a lot more expensive.

For example, 2001's and its star child weirdness, The IPCRESS file, and many others.

Seems more often scripts are written with an ending in mind nowadays, with the weird bandaids ending up in the middle instead.

Maybe a bit OT in an article that's trying to be about AI but...

[chilmers]

Yes, modern screenwriting classes hammer home some variation of the five-act structure and, the particular beats to hit at each point. It's rare for any narrative film, even indies, to deviate from it much, and you are absolutely told to map out your whole narrative and know where it's going before you begin.

I'm sure there are some screenwriters who ignore all that and just start writing. Particularly if they're experienced enough to have an intuitive grasp of structure. But if you're a first time writer and reach the night before a submission deadline and you haven't even finished the first draft, then you've got serious problems. Leaving aside the ending, any script needs multiple revisions with time in between so that you come back it with clear sight.

[preommr]

I hate AI, the other day a goblin broke in just as I was talking to chatgpt and asked me how many Ls in apple, and before I could say anything, the ai gave the wrong answer and I got stabbed.

But seriously, what're these scenarios? Waiting until the last minute for an ending to a script? Apparently a twist ending that somehow works with the rest of the movie, and is also used in another movie - with identical dialogue. You can't just copy and paste endings like that. Also, who cares? This is a world where the director instead of just saying the problem, sends a vague text, lets the writer go see the movie, and then deal with the fallout. In this world, the writer goes on to win the lottery and live happily ever after.

[uslic001]

South Park covered this years ago.

[b00ty4breakfast]

homogeneity is exactly what the industrial milieu is best suited towards, is it any wonder?

[smartmic]

I would offer another perspective: homogeneity is one of the greatest catalysts for capitalism (in all its forms: surveillance, finance and suppression). Therefore, shaping it is within the remit of big tech.

[mallowdram]

Unintentional satires aren't instructive, they're cringe.

[exit]

I am sorry, but the sameness will be quantified and dealt with algorithmically, as and if desired.

Dial up the temperature, launch however many parallel threads to research and avoid precedent, et cetera, ad infinitum.

I am sorry, but all of human creativity, including originality, is ultimately also just a mechanical phenomenon, and so it cannot resist mechanization.

Resistance is futile.