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So are the LLMs doomed to produce sophomoric prose forever? One theory is that this is simply a matter of prioritization. In some ways, creativity is directly at odds with AI companies’ other objectives. Generally, chatbots are trained to avoid misinformation, political bias, child-sexual-abuse material, copyright violations, and more. They are... See more

The computer doesn’t know any of this. It can’t know any of this. It can only read the cookbook; it can’t taste the meal. Objective knowledge can make your sentences true, but it can’t make them alive. Without access to subjective knowledge, you quickly hit a wall. And unlike all previous walls that AI has surmounted, you can’t overcome this one by... See more

Writing is a task that takes both objective and subjective intelligence. LLMs ace the objective parts the same way they ace every test; you can’t fault their grammar, semantics, or syntax. But good writing requires an additional bit of juju that makes the prose live and breathe, a light on the inside that can’t be quantified or checklisted. And... See more

The promise of artificial superintelligence is based on the idea that objective intelligence is the only intelligence. Or, even if there are multiple forms of intelligence out there, that they are fungible. To be an AI maximalist is to believe we are playing under Settlers of Catan rules, where if you have enough of any one resource, you can trade... See more

Objective intelligence can be trained, reinforced, and validated. Subjective intelligence cannot.

A system optimized for noise elimination is hostile to the genuinely new. It converges on what works, on what has worked. That convergence might produce excellent outputs by existing standards. But it will not produce the output that creates a new standard.

For Kant, judgment is the mental faculty that connects particulars to universals—the capacity to say “this thing is an instance of that category.” But judgment operates in two distinct modes.

The first is determinative judgment : you already have the rule, and you apply it to the case. “This animal is a mammal because it has fur, is warm-blooded,... See more