Agreed. Watching the intermediate "Thinking about X ... Now I'll do Y" text on GPT 5.4 lately has been like watching a hypothetical smart drug wear off.
All of the major models have been getting worse lately, not just Opus.
do you think that in the near future there's going to be an open weights model that's so good that people keep using it indefinitely instead of going back to frontier model providers?
We are almost at that point now, where the harnesses and tools are more important drivers of functionality and performance than the model weights themselves. We'll get there.
But then...propose that we make some laws to put rules around this stuff, also known as regulations and everybody goes "whoa hold up hold up hold up...I dunno about that part."
Of course, what those who call for regulation of AI or other nascent technologies are really saying is, "Unqualified and/or biased and/or corrupt and/or dull-witted people should make decisions that affect us all, based on incomplete, misleading or rapidly-evolving information, with the power to enforce them at gunpoint."
And then they wonder why other countries beat their own.
This interaction nicely illustrates why so many Americans sound hopeless when talking about these developments. We can't even get our fellow citizens to do anything about the school shootings, our incredibly expensive healthcare, the homelessness crisis, or really anything else. Instead we are surrounded by conservative reactionaries who view "let's stop dumping cyanide into the town pond" as a communist plot to steal their religion.
So yeah, when people around here look at "AI" and all the harm it's already doing, they don't any hope that regulations will be put in place before more harm is done.
No, you'll just say "That's not really very funny," or "That's not very impressive poetry," and nobody will be able to dispute it.
For some time now, at least a year, LLMs have been capable of doing both of these things well enough to fool you.
(Pastebin of my response below, which got nuked for whatever reason:
https://pastebin.com/buJBSgiq . Some if not most of them would've fooled me into thinking a human wrote them.)
- but in this case I wouldn't advocate for [dead]ing a mostly AI response as it was exactly what was asked for and it compares AI models when asked for potato based dad jokes.
I think you could make that case for poetry but I'm not sure about jokes. Great poems tell us something new or make us feel something new, which is hard to do when the subject is lemons, while jokes work by wedging the familiar into new contexts.
That's why the jokes work somewhat better than the poems here. I genuinely laughed at "Are those chips?" Which came from the model running on my own freakin' GPU.
Yeah I mean I also chuckle at good (or cheap) puns sometimes. But wordplay and puns are the current ceiling of LLMs. Good at them because they're purely structural (pattern-match on phonetics, then swap the meaning). In that bit, there's no buildup, no callbacks, no escalation, no expectations to subvert, no thesis, no perspective.
Grounded, buried, couchy, deep-seated, eyes, baked... It's like a thesaurus!
I feel like human comedians would have to deal with a lot of layered subtleties. They would make the potatoes _serve the bit_ instead of _be the bit_.
Potatoes are easily the most intimidating
audience for a stand-up comedian. They have
dozens of eyes to judge you with, they are
almost always baked by the time you get on stage,
and if your set really starts to bomb, they are
the only ones in the room who are actually looking
forward to a roasting!
GPT 5.4:
Potatoes are the only food we traumatize into greatness.
Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B, running locally on my graphics card:
(Steps up to the mic, adjusts the stand,
and looks around the room)
Alright everyone, settle down. You know,
I've been thinking a lot lately... mostly
about my dating life. Or rather, my lack of it.
See, my last relationship was with a potato.
And honestly? It was amazing at first. We had
so much in common. She was grounded, she loved being
buried deep under the covers, and we were perfect
together until the heat came on. But then... well,
let's just say she started to get a little couchy.
(Pauses for effect)
No, wait, that's not it. The real problem was that she
had some really deep-seated issues. Literally! She was
covered in eyes. Every time we tried to have an intimate
conversation, she'd just stare at me with a dozen
different expressions. It was weirdly intense. Like, "I
see you," "You're suspicious," "Wait, are those chips?"
Anyway, thanks guys! You've been a great crowd. You're
like potatoes to me... you're all baked tonight!
GPT 5.4:
Not every light is gentle.
Some light shines with sharpened edge.
A lemon keeps the memory of sun
but teaches it into bitterness,
as if to say:
what wakes the mouth
may also wake the soul.
We do not ripen only into sweetness.
Sometimes the truest gold
is tart.
Opus 4.6:
A lemon on the table
is already an argument—
that yellow can be sour,
that beauty owes you nothing.
Peel it and the room
takes sides.
The rind remembers being whole.
The flesh forgives too quickly.
What's left is yours:
a stain on wood,
a sting in the hangnail
you forgot you had.
Qwen 3.5 122B-A10B:
To cut it is to break a seal,
Where bitterness and sweetness dwell.
A sudden bite, both stinging, sweet—
The taste of earth beneath our feet.
No sugar softens all its sting,
It forces soul to wake and sing.
A small, fierce orb, yellow as dawn,
Teaching the tongue how life is born.
Your turn. Go round up some English-lit grad students and give them the same prompts. I can't do any better, myself, but maybe they can.
I don't consider AI to threaten "damage to society" the way you seem to, but I did find it interesting to think about how ridiculously well-produced the video was, and what that might signify in the future.
I kept squinting and scrutinizing it, looking for signs that it was rendered by a video model. Loss of coherence in long shots with continuity flaws between them, unrealistic renderings of obscure objects and hardware, inconsistent textures for skin and clothing, that sort of thing... nope, it was all real, just the result of a lot of hard work and attention to detail.
Trouble is, this degree of perfection is itself unrealistic and distracting in a Goodhart's Law sense. Musicians complain when a drum track is too-perfectly quantized, or when vocals and instruments always stay in tune to within a fraction of a hertz, and I do have to wonder if that's a hazard here. I guess that's where you're coming from? If you wanted to train an AI model to create this type of content, this is exactly what you would want to use as source material. And at that point, success means all that effort is duplicated (or rather simulated) effortlessly.
So will that discourage the next-generation of LaurieWireds from even trying? Or are we going to see content creators deliberately back away from perfect production values, in order to appear more authentic?
Why is it my responsibility or anyone else's to do your thinking for you?
I've seen more than enough of your political comments to know you aren't arguing in good faith here. You aren't interested in a discussion, you're interested in an argument. You consider capitalism to be the only moral, just and valid system by definition, and you consider any possible faults with capitalism to be the result of not doing capitalism hard enough.
When you can view politics and economics in something other than religious terms then maybe we can talk honestly about capitalism and its alternatives. Otherwise, I mean, all you intend to bring to the table is "free market good, leftists bad" and I've already met a million of you here.
If you have something that emits a lot of alpha particles as it decays, you could surround it with a source of electrons, I suppose. The details would have to be left as an exercise, and I doubt you'd get enough helium to be very useful unless you were dealing with large amounts of ridiculously-radioactive substances.
Same with fusion. Due to the implications of E=mc^2, fusion yields a lot of energy and a uselessly-small amount of matter. There don't seem to be many good ways to get a lot of helium besides either waiting millions of years for it to show up naturally, or carefully recycling what we already have.
All of the major models have been getting worse lately, not just Opus.
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