Venkatesh Rao

In each joke/story, coming up with the gag or idea takes 1% of the time. Binding it with the right kind of opinionated detail is the slow part. The more you’re a naturally abstract/analytical thinker, the more it will feel like brute force search rather than blithe inspiration.

When you read purely manually written fiction or review fully human generated design, you can tell which details the author/designer just chose arbitrarily vs deliberately. The proportion is much higher in genre fiction and generic engineering.

When you read literary fiction or review the design of extreme engineering, like the Mars rover, you are struck by how much more of it is consciously chosen or painstakingly optimized. The reason is trying to pack a lot more reality into fewer words/atoms.

This is not “realism.” It’s not that Ulysses is more “realistic” than say a pulp western or that the Mars rover is more “real” than a cheap Kia. It’s that there’s a lot more at stake, lot less room for error, and far higher cost of evolutionary learning through trial and error.

Most fiction and design have a ton of slack because there is design room you can waste. Lots of variables can be indifferently phoned in. But extremes have less slack. If something isn’t essential or influential, but merely interchangeable, it’s a sign there’s slack to eliminate.

Humans are the bottleneck in authorship btw. Designs and fictions are limited in complexity by how much detail individual human brains can be opinionated about. As a result, when you throw machine learning at human design domains weird things can happen.

Many engineered artifacts are already featuring a high percentage of machine-generated design content. Mostly in hidden parts we can’t see, otherwise we’d be creeped out by the clearly alien aesthetics at work. This isn’t AGI btw, nor a portent of it. This is narrow, closed AI.