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Comment by riebschlager | Hacker News Reader

Why would I want an LLM to be creative? I want to use these tools to express my creativity, not its own.

If I'm asking simply and directly for a pelican riding a bicycle, then please honor my intent and gimme that pelican. I don't need it on the moon. I do not need a top hat. I just want what I asked for.

Fulfilling a simple request simply seems like a feature, not a bug.

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They already do this, if you ask for a pelican on a bicycle you will get a pelican on a bicycle. However your simple prompt has very little semantic capacity and underspecifies the rest. This phenomenon makes the underspecified part devolve into annoying repetitive patterns that are the same for everyone and even in the same generation.

I guess we have different expectations from these tools. I want predictability and direct-ability. I don't know how we can have that from LLMs without some emergent same-ness in outputs to vague prompts.

Snapping out of the "boring and repetitive" rut here is on us to prompt more creatively. Maybe that's the new "garbage in, garbage out".

You can't predict it either way as it still makes "random" choice unrelated to what you asked (because you haven't asked for anything in particular!). It's just "frozen" random.

well, what you asked for is not completely specified so maybe there should be some variation (or more variation than there currently is) in the output (with a pelican on a bike being the common part). Just because you asked for a pelican riding a bicycle, why shouldn't it have a top hat or be on the moon? Just some common sense reasoning?

A simple request implies a request for a minimally-viable product. Including a top hat in that MVP is a much more deliberate creative choice. There's nothing necessary about a top hat for the pelican svg.

"Make me a PB&J" should result in what a reasonable person would consider a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I don't want to interact with an unpredictable system that "thought it would be fun" to deep-fry it.

"Well, you didn't say NOT to deep-fry it!"

It still makes the choice for the parts underspecified by you, the necessity doesn't go anywhere. But the choice is fixed, repetitive, and yet still unpredictable, because it's made by a random fluke in model's internals rather than thoughtfully chosen.

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