Are You More Creative Than an LLM?

Edited from my comment on a LinkedIn post by Roger Dooley, who I don't know.

Roger wrote about an article in "Nature" that describes Centaur, an LLM that predicts human behavior with uncanny accuracy. It reminded me of another project that's similar, but in an opposite way.

A team of researchers created an interesting experiment that tries to measure one aspect of creativity. From www.datcreativity.com/about:

🙶The Divergent Association Task is a quick measure of verbal creativity and divergent thinking, the ability to generate diverse solutions to open-ended problems🙷

So it's sort of like the project Roger described, but in reverse: Instead of asking an LLM to predict human decisions, in a sense it analyzes our ability to be unpredictable. It asks for 10 common nouns, chooses the first 7 that it deems "acceptable," and estimates how different they are from each other:

🙶The average score is 78, and most people score between 74 and 82. The lowest score was 24 and the highest was 96 in our published sample. Although the scores can theoretically range from 0 to 200, in practice they range from 6 to around 110 after millions of responses online.🙷

For fun, I thought it might be interesting to compare a human's results to LLMs. Guess who won? 😀️

🤖 Gemini scored 67.98, higher than 5.90% of the people who completed the task.

 

 

🤖 ChatGPT scored 79.1, higher than 54.23% of the people who completed the task.

 

 

 

🧑 I scored 86.8, higher than 91.52% of the people who completed the task.

 

Given this highly scientific (ha!) sample size of 1, it seems we humans are still better than LLMs at being human.

 

If you choose to take the test, I'd love to know your score—please post it in the comments! 

 

Enjoying the Zen

One of my favorite achievements at Google was my ultimately successful year-long struggle to convince the YouTube TV team to fix the comma splice in their "We'll be right back, enjoy the zen." [sic] interstitials.

I loved the relaxing scenes, but every time one of them showed on our TV, the neighbors could probably hear a Charlie Brown-esque AAAUUUUGGHH! from our living room.

This went on for months.

How to Ruin an Interview Before it Starts

It was my first “real” job after grad school, so I was still very young. The company was holding an open house for interviews after hours, and they asked me to participate.

I was one of the interviewers.

I walked to our lobby to greet my next candidate, a gentleman who was probably mid-40s, dressed reasonably but not particularly impressively. It was easy to tell instantly that he thought he was Very Important, and that the formality of an interview was a nuisance.

Irrational, but Real!

Based on my answer to the question "How is it possible to draw or make a 1x1 right triangle if the square root of 2 is irrational?" which was posted January 2, 2021 on Quora.

I think what you’re asking is how we can create a physical object (or a drawing of one) if one or more of its dimensions is irrational. In other words, if a number ends in a decimal that never terminates or repeats (such as the square root of two), how can it actually exist?

Source: Wikimedia Commons