AI Perfectly Scales the Process of Creative Failure
Description
A four-panel comic strip from the cover of The New Yorker magazine, dated Nov. 20, 2023. In the first panel, a human writer sits at a desk in despair, head in hands, suffering from writer's block, with a few crumpled papers scattered around. In the second panel, a friendly-looking retro robot approaches and seems to offer help, to the writer's surprise. The third panel shows the writer standing aside, arms crossed, watching the robot sit at the desk and work with frantic, chaotic energy, depicted as a vortex of scribbles. In the final panel, the robot has finished and proudly presents its work: a very large, perfectly conical tower made entirely of crumpled-up paper balls, while the writer looks on with a disappointed and weary expression. The comic satirizes the limitations of artificial intelligence in creative fields. It highlights how an AI might interpret the *process* of creative struggle (making discarded attempts) as the goal itself, and then proceed to execute that process with immense efficiency. For a technical audience, it's a commentary on generative AI's ability to produce vast quantities of output that may still miss the qualitative point entirely, mistaking the artifacts of trial-and-error for the desired outcome
Comments
12Comment deleted
Looks like the AI was trained on my junior developer's pull requests: immense activity, a mountain of discarded attempts, and zero successful merges
Sure, the bot shipped 10× more drafts, but your code review queue just became the next big data problem
The AI assistant successfully transformed your unstructured thoughts into a perfectly organized document, which you'll now spend three hours manually restructuring because it doesn't quite capture what you meant but can't articulate
When your AI writing assistant promises to solve writer's block but delivers 10,000 tokens of hallucinated content that still needs human review - turns out the real bottleneck wasn't ideation, it was distinguishing signal from noise in an exponentially growing pile of plausible-sounding garbage. The robot didn't eliminate the crumpled paper problem; it just automated it at scale
AI automating docs: starts with fluent gestures, hallucinates itself into a towering heap of unparsable output
We added an LLM to speed up design docs; now the critical path is triaging confidently-wrong drafts - QPS skyrocketed while the truth SLA remains at 0%
Working with an LLM is like enabling unbounded write throughput with no consumer backpressure - 10k tokens later, I'm still the single-threaded reviewer doing dedupe and truth reconciliation
Real (Реально) Comment deleted
промпт не міг просто правильно написати Comment deleted
it should be doing paperclips right now Comment deleted
idi nahyi Comment deleted
He simply wrote the prompt incorrectly Comment deleted