It turns out that AI is even less creative than we thought

These days, you can’t scroll through social media without seeing AI accusations being floated, be it a soulless ad campaign or a mysterious “work of art.” Sometimes it’s completely obvious, sometimes you get the eerie feeling that something artificial is going on, and now studies have shown that the sixth sense is no coincidence.

It turns out that AI loves to recycle the same 12 tropes, resulting in those formulaic, Gaussian-blurred images that many of us have come to loathe. While there are ways to properly leverage AI for productivity, creative originality is clearly not the technology’s strong suit.

In a recent study published in the data science journal Patterns, researchers ran a classic game of telephone between two AI models (Stable Diffusion XL and LLaVA). Like a game of ping-pong, the models were asked to generate images back and forth for 100 rounds. Predictably, they soon deviated from their original request, but most…