CONCEPT
The Chasm of Mediocrity
Eno's phrase for the statistical average toward which AI-generated creative work inexorably gravitates — the comfortable, professional, forgettable middle that the architecture of large language models is structurally engineered to produce.
The chasm of mediocrity is Brian Eno's compressed diagnosis of the fundamental problem with AI-generated creative work. When Eno tested a song generator trained to produce material in his own style, he found the outputs not too bad — competent, recognizable, adequate — but none good enough to release. The failure mode, he explained, was structural: the system was designed to produce the statistically probable, and the statistically probable, for a system trained on the aggregate of human creative output, is by mathematical necessity the average. The first task of any creative practitioner using such tools, Eno concluded, is to stop it going down into the chasm of mediocrity that it will always want to go into, because that's the way it's set up. The phrase captures, with characteristic concision, why AI's competence is the opposite of its creativity.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The phrase emerged from Eno's direct experimentation with generative AI tools trained