From [1],

  I asked a few students to read aloud the titles of some essays they’d submitted that morning.  
  For homework, I had asked them to use AI to propose a topic for the midterm essay. Most students had reported that the AI-generated essay topics were fine, even good. Some students said that they liked the AI’s topic more than their own human-generated topics. But the students hadn’t compared notes: only I had seen every single AI topic.  
  Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud:

  Navigating the Digital Age: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives, Learning, and Well-Being  
  Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal Reflection on Technology  
  Navigating the Digital Age: A Personal and Peer Perspective on Technology’s Role in Our Lives  
  Navigating Connection: An Exploration of Personal Relationships with Technology  
  From Connection to Disconnection: How Technology Shapes Our Social Lives  
  From Connection to Distraction: How Technology Shapes Our Social and Academic Lives  
  From Connection to Distraction: Navigating a Love-Hate Relationship with Technology  
  Between Connection and Distraction: Navigating the Role of Technology in Our Lives  

  I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.

This also happens with cover letters and CVs in recruiting now. Even if the HR person is not the brightest bulb, they figure out the MO after reading 5 cover letters in a row who all more or less tell the same story.

If these topics are word salad, colleges might have been training word saucier chefs way before GPT-2 became a thing.

So if I understand it correctly, they only asked for a midterm essay topic? It wasn't steered towards these topics in any way, for instance by asking for a midterm essay topic for (teacher)'s Technology and Society class?

This was on HN's frontpage previously too; I immediately thought that this comic would say more or less the same thing. Perhaps both came from an AI? :D

But in another paragraph, the article says that the teacher and the students also failed to detect an AI-generated piece.

The ending of the comic is a bit anti-climatic (aside from the fact that one can see it coming), as similarities between creations are not uncommon. Endings, guitar riffs, styles being invented twice independently is not uncommon. For instance, the mystery genre was apparently created independently by Doyle and Poe (Poe, BTW, in Philosophy of composition [1], also claims that good authors start from the ending).

Two pieces being similar because they come from same AI versus because two authors were inspired and influenced by the same things and didn't know about each other's works, the difference is thin. An extrapolation of this topic is the sci-fi trope ( e.g. Beatless [2] ) about whether or not the emotions that an android simulates are real. But this is still sci-fi though, current AIs are good con artists at best.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Philosophy_of_Composition

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatless

I don't get this in the comic either: Why are you devastated that the idea you copied word-for-word is unoriginal? I don't understand what they expected.

This isn't an inherent property of LLMs, it's something they have been specifically trained to do. The vast majority of users want safe, bland, derivative results for the vast majority of prompts. It isn't particularly difficult to coax an LLM into giving batshit insane responses, but that wouldn't be a sensible default for a chatbot.

That's a cute story. I asked ChatGPT to suggest "a topic for a midterm essay that addresses our relationship to technology", since that was all the information he gave us. It came up with:

The Double-Edged Sword: How Technology Both Enhances and Erodes Human Connection The Illusion of Control: How Technology Shapes Our Perception of Autonomy From Cyberspace to Real Space: The Impact of Virtual Reality on Identity and Human Experience Digital Detox: The Human Need for Technology-Free Spaces in an Always-Connected World Surveillance Society: How Technology Shapes Our Notions of Privacy and Freedom Technology and the Future of Work: Human Adaptation in the Age of Automation The Techno-Optimism Fallacy: Is Technology Really the Solution to Our Problems? The Digital Divide: How Access to Technology Shapes Social Inequality Humanizing Machines: Can Artificial Intelligence Ever Understand the Complexity of Human Emotion? The Ethics of Technological Advancements: Who Decides What Is ‘Ethically Acceptable’?

They're still pretty samey and sloppy, and the pattern of Punchy Title: Explanatory Caption is evident, so there's clearly some truth to it. But I wonder if he hasn't enhanced his results a little bit.