Hacker News Reader

Comment by refulgentis | Hacker News Reader

There was an actual peer-reviewed article from an institution yesterday showing, numerically, robustly, human evaluated, that LLMs are better at creative thinking than humans.

I don't think handwaving about exclusively outputting training data and random punditry via article really holds up here.

It's wrong for so many reasons, from the training data having more perspectives, to the "Fat Tony" test, empirically, we can go make it output novel combinations right now, to the CS test, we can have it emulate arbitrary Turing machines.

View on HN

There is a difference between a verbatim answer and an answer in the shape of a verbatim answer. The latter is not much better if you actually want to do new things.

Might you possibly have a link?

My bad, looked it up and meant to edit it in, dunno what happened: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10858891/

The methodology of this paper is seriously suspect.

First they have a very small sample size of around n = 150. Second, they don't represent average husband, they use people working on mechanical Turk for $9 an hour.

Finally, they don't have any standard measures of divergent thought - they just use 4 different types of question answering problems, and those are supposed to measure creativity. Whether they do or don't would require us to evaluate the questions.

It's important to be clear that this is saying that LLMs might be more creative than low paid workers on mechanical Turk, given no training time. That's not a very good representation of the average human, or the fact that humans need training.

So for example, an average doctor or scientist might still be more creative than LLMs.

Tldr; this is not a good paper to throw around if you want to convince people. It's truly awful in its design, and the way it's presented is not always honest.

No results for mechanical turk, n=151 is perfectly significant for what amounts to a taste test (I was quite taken aback to read that, 151 is low in very few contexts), I'm not "throwing it around", whatever that means in this context, and the extreme reaction and 100% focus on it belies that it was 1 of 3 short points I made, as well as that the research backs up the claim that was shut down, that is intuitively correct, I'd rather have a 1000 specialists at undergrad level ideating than me and Einstein and Picasso and Steve Jobs.

So, yeah, between that, and that both your average person and someone arguing from Turing tapes can show AI doing things not in the training data, I'm going with actual data thats being "thrown around" rather than the rando blog post that argues from "by definition it can't be creative because it isn't original because it only repeats training data" Call me when they're at N=152 on a blind test.

They also don’t seem to be taking into consideration the fact that answers to those tests may already be present in the training data.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com