Why are some answers boring and others off-the-wall? — Coming up with ideas
Turn the knob up and your ideas get wider, but the picking is still up to you.
1 · Think first
Whether AI gives you a boring answer or an off-the-wall one comes down to this: when it picks the next word, does it grab only the most likely one, or less likely ones too?
There's a real knob that widens and narrows that range, and it's called "temperature". Turn it down and you only get safe words; turn it up and rarely used words start popping out.
So when you're gathering ideas, the trick is to turn the knob up, generate lots, and pick for yourself. The higher you go, the more nonsense you get, too.
2 · Experiment · Probability slider
Try it — What happens to ideas when you turn the knob up?
At 0, the knob only grabs the most likely word; at 100, it grabs unlikely words too. Turn it and watch where the bars lean. (A real AI's "temperature" is usually between 0 and 2. Here we stretched it to 0–100 so you can get a feel for it.)
Figure
Knob turned down vs turned up
Same question, but one knob changes the whole character of the answer.
3 · Quiz
Quick check
Three questions. Pick an answer and it's marked right away, with the reason why.
Today in one line
Today in one line
Turn the knob up and your ideas get wider,
but the picking is still up to you.
Learn more
- A paper showing that grabbing only the most likely words actually makes writing go strange — The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration (2019)
- Generate several times and go with the answer that comes up most, and you get more accurate — the power of generating lots — Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models (2022)