I'm not convinced that "more training" is a silver bullet here because "for you and the people you learned from" is a subset—potentially a tiny one—of the world of potential training data.

Even with newer model generations larger efforts still seem to drift back towards "default choices" vs "steered specific aims."

In many areas, "good" taste is not particularly good anymore when it's everything's default style.

The edge then becomes finding the niches that (a) can be better served w/ non-defaults and (b) have economic characteristics that make it worth catering towards those.

I think the days of one-size-fits-all huge-scale-and-ROI SaaS swiss army knives are quite numbered, but I think the replacement world could be a much more vibrant ecosystem with a much more varied set of players.

Good point. What I'm thinking is probably more like individual taste. An AI trained is kind of a collection of different tastes. What would be interesting is to see is if a "collective" taste that would yield good products on its own. Design by committee often creates things that have conflicting points of view. Can a trained AI do better than design by committee? It's obviously not a committee and not an individual (at least in the human sense). Is there something inherent in following general principles that makes it difficult to have a specific point of view in the creation of a product? My thinking is it's probably possible to train AI to have, say, an "Apple taste" and make good Apple-like products but that taste might not be suitable for particular products or needs. A "Linux taste" might be better for some things, but not for others, and so on. If we did get to that point, then there'd still be a need for a choice to be made about what particular "taste hat" to put on, and likely an AI can be trained to do even that. Definitely an interesting thing to ponder!

I feel that AI does have individual taste (and even "personality"), but it's the same monotonous individual taste across all instances of the same trained AI. The sheer scale of its repetition turns it into a hated trope: like how we can immediately identify slop writing, diagrams, websites, etc.

I'm sure we've all met someone who has a unique speaking style and might repeat phrases or words unusually often, but that still doesn't bug us as much as "the honest truth.." or "load-bearing.."

it must be what TV was like in the 60s. only a few channels. everyone had the same jokes the next day in school or work. We all saw the same episodes.

In this way each time ChatGPT or Claude is released, new memetic phrasology is emitted into the human psyche at astoundind speed.

> everyone had the same jokes

I wonder? Surely total viewership across those few channels was less than an episode of Friends in the 90s.

And I'd bet people watched less television and engaged in other activities, maybe came up with some jokes of their own.

(Doesn't really have anything to do with your point, sorry)

I guess maybe it is like Agent Smith from the Matrix. Nothing particularly detestable about the individual, but what makes it distasteful is that same individual is in millions of places.

> It may not be your taste, but it certainly has taste, and its taste will only get better with more training. Yours, if you use it, will atrophy, as you reduce contact with the details of your problems.

I would argue that it has a collection of tastes and mixes and matches them with the same effect if you prepared a dish that is an amalgamation of recipes from ten different people. It is somewhat similar to what you want to make, it will fulfill your nutritional needs but boy does it not taste good. Our PR reviews and steering the agent is nothing but us adding different ingredients / herbs / spices until it is palatable.