Computers Can't Surprise

Richard Beard, “Computers Can’t Surprise”:

To escape the dead man’s handle of cliché, readers live in hope for organic associations, speculative leaps and surprise inferences. Whereas, to an AI, which is fed the answer before the question, ‘surprise’ remains an elusive concept.

. . .

An LLM’s calculation of the most likely sequence of words is the least likely way to create great writing. Anyone working at a more emotionally engaged level than statistical probability, genuinely creating new work, has a better chance of resonating with readers, however that affinity is expressed.

. . .

. . . the rest of us can defy AI creep by defending and encouraging the human ambition to make art, unassisted, whether successful or otherwise. Art is an affirmation of human existence, the transmission and reception of messages about encounter and connection. One inner life can touch another and, for best results, nurture a creative process that no LLM can imitate.

I keep coming back to this idea: there are things that generative, agentic systems are very good at. But creativity remains one of the things that will likely never be “solvable” by LLMs because they’re only as good as what they’re trained on. They cannot create new things because, by definition, their outputs are simply probabilistic orderings of words that I described as “sentenced shaped.” Those aren’t words generated by thought, by feeling, by hours of thinking and deep research. It’s just a regurgitation of a training set.