Quick Thoughts: GenAI & LLMs

I was getting caught up with some of my socials - mainly the IRC/Discord for omg.lol and say a spirited discussion on GenAI and the immediate impacts it is having on people's lives.

One of the people mentioning a measurable negative impact of GenAI on their livelihood was Andy Carolan - a super talented designer and illustrator who made the logo design for my home brew efforts. If you need any illustration work done, I strongly recommend reaching out to him - he is amazing to work with.

I am still working on refining these thoughts, but one of the largest issues, to me, is the convergence of style as more and more people come to rely on GenAI over human creativity. We already live in a world where risk isn't rewarded and many companies just want to rehash and repackage existing things in the hopes we're more interested in buying what we are familiar with than something new and useful.

Look at movies – how many live action remakes of existing films need to happen before we actually get something new being done?

Look at the top ecommerce sites — They fall over themselves to make sure they are looking like everyone else.

We already know that GenAI/LLMs aren't able to create new things. Sure, LLMs are well suited for extracting trends from data, but when it comes to making wholecloth new things? All it can do is look at what already existed and do some pattern matching to pump out something similar...

As GenAI becomes leveraged more to "speed things up" and "provide better ROI for the shareholders", we are going to see a larger convergence of design across multiple sectors since people aren't taking the time to think if the output is good... they are just looking to check a box and move on to the next thing in their mountain of to-dos.

We already have reports from companies that went "AI First" that they need to rehire humans because the AI output wasn't of high quality, it wasn't predictable, and it usually introduced more errors than it fixed. But because AI is the new NFT/Crypto/Blockchain/DevOps/Agile/Whatever other trend people blindly follow because everyone else is doing it, people will still try to go all in on it because it will of course be different for them...

What does all this mean? I don't know... I am still booting up and just finishing my first cup of coffee. I just don't like where things are headed – It feels like there is a loud, yet unspoken, declaration that creativity and craft have no value. That "content" is all that matters. That the output is more important than the intent. That we are lined up a trough and it doesn't matter what is in there.. any slop will do.