> skills/unique_and_interesting.md

Yes, I’m sure the thousands of LLMs running the exact same instructions will all be unique.

Until I read some of the responses, I misread your message as saying "naive to think you CAN reduce these to instructions" and thought "Well obviously. That's not insightful." Eventually I reread your message to realize you were saying the opposite.

You can get some interesting new ideas out of it but it takes some work. Especially when a prompt is stateless. It need to know about it's previous novel ideas but also not be polluted/directed by them. Im not sure what it would take to get it to continuously churn out novel ideas.

So.. a while ago I was experimenting with using random wikipedia pages and then asking the model to think about concepts, trends or connections between a few pages..

Then I would ask it the actual brain storming problem I had.

In practice it worked pretty well to get ideas that were not the default ideas that the models will come up with.

Now though, you can also seed with anything really and the agents can do the researching. The research itself will probably push the solutions into novel spaces.

You mean seed the context with random information then ask it to ideate on something totally unrelated?

Like you want it to figure out how to get som information in front of potential customers in a cost effective way but first you give it articles on Witchita, Kansas, the curling iron, and List of Italian Brands?

Yes, I havent seen research on this tactic specifically for language models but for generative image models you can find research thatindicates you get far more variety and diversity in the images returned when suffixing the context with "noisy context" such as random letters or something else unrelated that wont "confuse" it or make it go off the rails

That's how I understood it! Clever hack. You'll get more varied ideas by using many different seeds, than if you didn't use a seed and just asked the LLM in a fresh context.

Reminds of Freudian dream analysis.

The actual content of the dream is meaningless, lacks symbolism, but it prompts the patient to think deeply about personal feelings and memories that might otherwise not surface to conscious level.

At some point you or the agent has to pick the one it thinks will land with the target market.

Some markets you can brute force, like mass-mailing and online display ads, and hope you find something that converts sooner or later.

So I'd suggest people find areas to play in where that doesn't really work. Where selection cost and changing cost are high, and sales is played on extra-hard mode. (Tricky thing is... those sales are hard, of course.)

If you want to beat the model you have to go where feedback isn't fast enough for it to converge on the thing that resonates with actual people before they write it off.

There's another way to ask your problem to something that's thought about concepts, trends and connections.

That aside, interesting approach. I wonder if the quality of the sample makes a big impact. Does it help if the articles are entirely disparate, or related? Does it help if the articles are related or unrelated to the problem?

I’d love to see your pass at a “unique and interesting” skill. I’ve been working on tools and techniques in this area, and it’s harder than you might think.

Do you really think AI can automate distribution, marketing, sales? That's just spam.

Oh my friend, it can. We have ours running and using unique skills it learns from online. You allow it to update skills and see what works - from there it just keeps building better and better skill sets.

Until everybody’s AI talks to everybody’s AI and tokens will be churned with no utility, and all the valuable business meetings will happen face to face behind closed doors.

Yeah. We are definitely headed to a world where, more than ever, success is determined simply by whether or not you're allowed through the closed door.

It can create more shit than humans could ever consume I’m sure, but then why? What new ventures/opportunities is it opening for most humans?

Great point, the shit is going to get more pervasive for sure.

But also, there is the enablement of new fields of original and creative endeavor: I think we can already see this in some of the brilliant and useful apps being made, often by solo 'teams'.

I don't want to play down the harmful effects AI, but the flip side is that the opportunities for original ideas are many and varied.

Paul Graham wrote about taste being the moat https://paulgraham.com/taste.html

I get the feeling a lot of people who build things with AI think they are in on the ground floor of something when in fact they are on the top floor.

It's still spam when a human does it.

Do you really think it can't?

That’s the implication I believe

I'm sure it can't. A competent marketer can make good use of it but vibecoders just create slop nobody wants to read.

You're describing most people. Most people (99.9%) can't come up with novel ideas either. They just follow the latest trend. Art, marketing, music, etc. If you've spent any time in the creative spaces, you'll realize most people don't really have much talent. Skill, sure, but that only gets you as far as someone else's latest idea.

Honestly growing up, I always assumed everyone could be creative. Until I started asking people to randomly create a name for a fictional character.

Blows my mind how many people won't or can't do it.

I still get anxiety thinking back to picking a gamer tag or email username and not coming up with anything original despite unlimited options.

Its hard to be creative without any constraints.

Never understood that. Until I witnessed exGF sweat bullets trying to do them same. You're not alone.

Group of friends I grew up with would challenge each other to say nonsense or make random lyrics to songs. NO clue it would actually turn into a creativity skill. Give it a try.

'Hatch free tent by red barn stunt over the objective'

AI being as bad as the average person in marketing is not good for AI