Tag: mediocrity

Just read through “You sound like a bot” by Adi Robertson in the Verge. I hadn’t really put my finger on the right word for my feelings about AI until reading that article but that’s it: it feels very mediocre.

If you want to get a rough overview of how the average frontend engineer might feel about a JavaScript framework, ChatGPT is useful enough. If you’re willing to ignore the questionable origins of the training data in use, Midjourney can be useful for rapid image generation for an early storyboard.

But as of right now, the output always feels meh, “yeah ok”. Never really surprises you with a unique perspective, or an unexpected visual language. That vibe is only becoming stronger as AI developers continue to sand off the “rough” edges on their products.

Maybe that will change. As Robertson says, “Maybe the schism between artists and AI developers will resolve, and we’ll see more tools that amplify human idiosyncrasy instead of offering a lowest-common-denominator replacement for it.”

That’s not happening any time soon. One reason is that artists have been given about 1,000 reasons to distrust AI, and I think that it is only widespread artistic use and input that could actually lead to that sort of breakthrough.

Another reason: spewing mediocrity is a pretty strong sweet spot for AI. AI is useful as a summarizer so long as you take the response with a grain of salt and follow up on sources. Case in point: Elicit seems pretty cool! Listen to this ShopTalk Show episode with Maggie Appleton for more.

Anyways, maybe we’ll eventually get to the point where AI has that human “spark”, who knows. Maybe it’ll happen next month and I’ll eat my words. Until then, as most of the content we experience online becomes more grey and sludgy, the personal will become far more valuable.

In Anil Dash’s article “The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again” for Rolling Stone late last year, he says that “the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent”. He places a lot of emphasis on the breakdown of the content silos we’ve relied on for so many years, which definitely seems like the major catalyst for the shift. But AI’s growing mediocrity will be the force that drives it home and really makes the human web stick.

(Related side point: clearly I need to read Filterworld by Kyle Chayka.)

Edit 21 Feb 2024: Maybe I should eat my words sooner? OpenAI just came out with Sora. Which is impressive! But… IDK, it still feels meh somehow? Maybe it’s just because it’s still early days, we’ll see.