A series of multi-panel comic strips^[1] I found posted on the socials recently posited an interesting question: what if [insert great artist/scientist/thinker here] had used AI?

The joke was that someone like, say, Darwin had asked AI about his nascent Theory of Evolution or Mary Shelly had ran her thoughts about her plot outline for Frankenstein past a chatbot and the LLM had replied with feedback: in all cases, the gag AI had showed reticence about straying far from established ideas and had discouraged the human from pursuing further work on their ideas.

It was supposed to just be a funny cartoon, but the notion rang a little too true and highlighted a subtle issue that I think many people feel about generative AI but find difficult to articulate: our experiences with these systems has almost uniformly been conformity and a kind of ersatz creativity within the bounds of what is already known.

There is an invisible novelty that fails to manifest in these systems. We don’t miss what we don’t know exists and thus cannot see. We may more and more feel the absence of bold ideas outside the metaphorical box as we more and more lean into these tools, but it is impossible to see what never was.

What if Darwin had used AI… and walked away from his theories because a chatbot had discouraged him with a list of reasons why those theories didn’t fit current thinking?

What if you used AI… and walked away from something interesting because you dreamed outside the establishment and AI pushed back?