I think the implication is that to be interesting you need to write from an individual's standpoint. That's why fiction written by LLMs sounds so boring (at least right now): because you can't amalgamate all the text in the world and not sound like an average.

> ‘Oh, do let me go on,’ said Wilde, ‘I want to see how it ends.’

Pretty great line.

People are average on average. OP is measuring LLM succes based on a super human test which most of us would likely fail. Creativity is just longer context and opinionated prompting. (For discussion purposes. I’m on 70% true.) Average Joe LLM and me are having a great time.

Not really on the topic of the FA, but I've heard a few times about the All Souls Exams and seen some sample essay prompts, and I would love to read some real essays written by test takers. Any pointers?

> The ultimate example may be All Souls College, which has a ritual, the Mallard Song, that occurs once a century.

You can't walk for more than five minutes in the UK without tripping over some nonsense like this. History is very important, and traditon has its place, but really? As a brit I find it all kind of tediously performative sometimes.

I sat the All Souls exam, taking the philosophy specialist papers, though I'm a math/physics/ML guy. It was a lot of fun, I really appreciate that there's somewhere in the world where these kinds of questions are asked in a formal setting. My questions/answers are written up in brief here [1]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/oxforduni/comments/q0giir/my_all_so...

* Oops, they link to my post at the bottom. Sorry for the redundancy.

I went to see the last Mallard Song. Just to say I went, of course. It looked like a bunch of weirdos in a courtyard to me, but it was a literally once-in-a-century event, and I was living less than a minute away, so why not?

I don't think I've ever heard of a scheduled ritual that has a longer period. You're guaranteed to never have anyone present at more than one of these, so surely many aspects of the ritual will wander quite far from the original?

As for LLMs on the All Souls test, it's predictable that it mostly whiffs. After all it takes in a diet of Reddit+Wikipedia+etc, none of which is the kind of writing they are looking for.

Reddit is a lot of crappy comments. If you have no grounding in reality (being a thing that lives in a datacentre), how are you going to curate it? Some subs are really quite good, but most are really quite bad. It's not easy to get guidance, of the kind you would get if you sat with a professor for three or four hours a week for a few years, which is what the humanities students actually do.

Wikipedia is a great reference work, but it tends to not have any of the kinds of connections you're supposed to make in these essays. It has a lot of factual stuff, so questions about Persia will look ok, like in the article. But questions that glue together ideas across areas? Nah. Even if that's in the dataset somewhere, how is the LLM supposed to know that the sort of refined writing of a cross-subject academic is the highest level of the humanities? It doesn't, so it spits out what the average Redditor might glue together from a bit of googling.

Past exams: https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/past-examination-papers

A few years ago, the Turing Test was universally seen as sufficient for identifying intelligence. Now we’re scouring the planet for obscure tests to make us feel superior again. One can argue that the Turing Test was not actually adequate for this purpose, but we should at least admit how far we have shifted the goalposts since as a result.