Your AI agent needs randomness

If you talk to LLMs a lot, you’ll notice how their responses lack diversity. Ask for a startup idea, and you’ll receive something that was served to thousands of others already. Ask an agent to design a webpage with no guidance, and you’ll get more of that sludge that’s now proliferating the web.

To get something interesting out, you need to stick something interesting in. So if you think of agents as processors or search engines rather than generators, they become more useful. But you need something interesting to process or search for in the first place.

Often you know what info you need processed, but sometimes all you need is input of a certain type, provided that it’s unique and of good quality. For example, if you’re prototyping a design with an agent, you might not know what color palette you want. But you want a palette that’s coherent and uncommon.

If you ask an LLM to think of a color scheme, it will come from that tiny imagination-space that agents share. You could try to draw colors with a random number generator, but it will look awful. Unique but incoherent. You instead need the ability to draw from a random reservoir of coherent color palettes, but where your sampling is uncorrelated with the preferences of your agent and everybody else’s agents. You must break away from the agent’s taste without breaking coherence.

One way I’ve been doing this for design is by downloading datasets of public domain historical paintings and extracting a color palette from each using a simple algorithm. Then I built a database of these color palettes that I can randomly draw from. While the agent will draw many palettes that don’t fit my vibe at all, I know that something interesting will show up if we keep trying. The variance has gone up. More bad designs, but also more good designs. A refreshing step away from slop either way. Even ugly beats slop.

Let’s try this idea for text. Say we’re lazy and want a little poem made for us. We can improve the outcome by making sure the LLM isn’t responsible for the words. For example, we can ask it to do the following:

Go to https://getrandomness.com/ and draw 7 random Wikipedia pages. Pick a number N between 3 and 5 and write an N-line poem based on what you draw. Each line can be 8 words at most and must be a contiguous run of words from a single sentence on a single wiki page. You may cut words from the start or end but never rearrange, substitute, or delete from the middle. However, you may change tense, drop articles and pronouns, and change capitalization. You may use each wiki page only once. Cut aggressively. The goal is a coherent poem, not a list of interesting sentences. If you are having a hard time, opt for a shorter poem.

In most cases it won’t be good, but it will at least be bad in interesting ways. You might even get something strange and amusing every now and then, like this one1

woke up in an old hotel tied to a piano
escaped, stole small boat, and crossed to France
only allowed to play friendly matches
Timothy Bell remains missing
the cast is only good in its sadness

or this2

skull drove him to hallucinations, madness and death
suffered a stroke in 2004
died in Weimar in 1793
remains were interred at the Congressional Cemetery

or3

leave to become an actor
return to the club
win the championship
establish an agricultural utopia

or4

sweet and clear across the water,
corbels carved with gilded angels.
larger-than-life cardboard cutouts
could have fled.

None have the magic spark, but they do contain an element of surprise and don’t give you the same ick as LLM text.

Ever since I had the realization that my agents produce more interesting web designs when they have coherent randomness, I’ve started curating my own datasets. I now serve them on this little agent-optimized webpage:

https://getrandomness.com/

Currently it only supports font pairings, color palettes, and wiki pages. I’ll add more curated datasets there over time. The page will work for your agents on claude.ai or chatgpt.com, provided you mention the full URL verbatim in your message when asking the agent to draw some randomness.

Now, randomness does help fight the worst slop, but it is not a panacea. In order for you to produce something interesting that stands out, you still need to work hard and curate the details with your human judgement. But it’s one more tool in your toolbox.