Being creative requires taking risks - by Henrik Karlsson

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When children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five, when they learn to be boring. The multicolored hedgehogs with 47 legs give way to a series of established forms and colors, like stick figures, pastel green grass, and houses with triangular roofs. The wild diversity is gone. From now on, it’s crude, habitual symbolism. Most people never relearn how to draw anything interesting again. This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure out how to do things “well enough” and then get stuck. One way to think about this is by analogy to what in machine learning is known as mode collapse. Mode collapse is when a generative model (most notoriously GANs) stops producing diverse outputs and instead obsessively reproduces a small subset of patterns that reliably fool the discriminator. We’ve seen this happen with language models. The early models, up until about 2020, were deranged but could write spectacularly surpr

Being creative requires taking risks Henrik Karlsson Jan 07, 2026 850 49 154 Share When children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five, when they learn to be boring. The multicolored hedgehogs with 47 legs give way to a series of established forms and colors, like stick figures, pastel green grass, and houses with triangular roofs. The wild diversity is gone. From now on, it’s crude, habitual symbolism. Most people never relearn how to draw anything interesting again. This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure

Being creative requires taking risks - by Henrik Karlsson

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