On actual mental illness specifically, as opposed to just “weirdness” in general, I have no hard data. If it’s caused at the physiological level, it makes sense that it wouldn’t follow the same pattern. You can of course name a bunch of mentally ill but prominent thinkers and artists from the past, but there’s almost certainly a lot of neglect of base rate going on there.
It’s worth noting production LLMs choose randomly from a significant range of tokens they deem fairly likely, as opposed to choosing the most likely one every time. If they were too conservative with it, they too would fall on the near side of that curve.
My point is that “weirdness” is rooted in subjectivity. Since LLMs have no subjectivity, they’re forced to rely on randomness, monkey-with-a-typewriter style, which is why their outputs are either banal or nonsensical.
So, when it comes to mental illness and creativity, despite some empirical correlations, “There is now growing evidence for the opposite association.”
However, there are inverse-U-shaped relationships between several mental characteristics and creativity:
Although you’ll notice that disinhibition rapidly becomes detrimental.
On actual mental illness specifically, as opposed to just “weirdness” in general, I have no hard data. If it’s caused at the physiological level, it makes sense that it wouldn’t follow the same pattern. You can of course name a bunch of mentally ill but prominent thinkers and artists from the past, but there’s almost certainly a lot of neglect of base rate going on there.
It’s worth noting production LLMs choose randomly from a significant range of tokens they deem fairly likely, as opposed to choosing the most likely one every time. If they were too conservative with it, they too would fall on the near side of that curve.
My point is that “weirdness” is rooted in subjectivity. Since LLMs have no subjectivity, they’re forced to rely on randomness, monkey-with-a-typewriter style, which is why their outputs are either banal or nonsensical.