causal

Charismatic averaging makes default outputs boring

Just as people who must appeal to large audiences are incentivized toward boring, non-divisive views, language models trained to maximize average preference may produce benign, average creative output (e.g., generic rhyming poems); prompting the model to be fully creative can push it off that average.

causalpending

Speaker

Amanda Askell

Evidence Quote

people who have to talk to a lot of people and be very charismatic, one of the weird things is that I’m like, well, they’re kind of incentivized to have these extremely boring views

Source

Dario AmodeiLex Fridman Podcast
Created: 6/13/2026, 3:36:36 AM

My Notes

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