Human authorship?

Posted Jul 1, 2025 17:49 UTC (Tue) by excors (subscriber, #95769)
In reply to: Human authorship? by anselm
Parent article: Supporting kernel development with large language models

> AIUI, with AI there is no unique deterministic relationship between the prompt you're entering and what the AI produces. If you feed your AI image generator (or what have you) the same prompt twice in a row you will probably get different results, so the output does not depend solely on the human effort on the input side.

It generally isn't non-deterministic, but it is pseudorandom. The input includes the prompt plus a PRNG seed; if you use the same prompt and seed, and sufficiently similar software and hardware, then you should get exactly the same output. (Some UIs might not let you set the seed, but that's just a UI limitation.)

With image generators there's also some coherence across prompts: if you use the same seed with two similar but different prompts, you'll probably get similar but different outputs. So you can generate a bunch of images with one prompt across many arbitrary seeds, pick your favourite, then reuse the seed and tweak the prompt to get a variation on that image; it's not completely chaotic and unpredictable. (They work by starting with an image of pure noise, then progressively denoising it guided by the prompt. Using the same seed means starting with the same noise, and it seems a lot of the output's high-level structure is determined by that noise and is preserved through all the denoising.)