Gary King: When AI Makes Each of Us Better & All of Us Worse (and what to do about it)

Tech companies train large language models (LLMs) to give the correct answer to factual questions, which, for questions with no correct answer, means giving the most common one. As a result, each scientist, artist, and writer who uses an LLM becomes more productive, while science, art, and literature as a whole become more homogeneous and conventional. An LLM suggests more creative ideas for a paper, startup, or living-room wall than you would think of alone, but it also gives nearly the same ideas to your colleagues, competitors, and neighbors. We illustrate with an experiment showing that LLM reviews of journal submissions now dominate the best human peer reviews (by any relevant measure). This will help authors, reviewers, editors, and journals but, with effectively one judge (since different LLMs compete on the same benchmarks), it risks homogenizing the field. We then introduce the first algorithm to induce creativity by enabling users to understand and choose from the whole search space of possible answers. We illustrate with applications ranging from the choice of research topics in world history to wedding dress shopping.

Based on joint work with (subsets of) Queenie Luo, Mike Puett, Mike Smith, and Steve Worthington.  

Gary King is the Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor at Harvard University – one of 25 with Harvard’s most distinguished faculty title – and Director of the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. King develops and applies empirical methods in many areas of social science, focusing on innovations that span the range from statistical theory to practical application.

King is an elected Fellow in 8 honorary societies (National Academy of Sciences, American Statistical Association, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Society for Political Methodology, National Academy of Social Insurance, American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the Guggenheim Foundation) and has won more than 55 prizes and awards for his work. King was elected President of the Society for Political Methodology and Vice President of the American Political Science Association. He has been a member of the Senior Editorial Board at Science, Visiting Fellow at Oxford, and Senior Science Adviser to the World Health Organization. He has written more than 190 journal articles, 30 open source software packages, and 8 books.

https://gking.harvard.edu/bio/