How Stanford Researchers Unlocked 2× More Diverse AI Outputs Without Retraining a Single Model
9 min readJust now
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The Problem We’ve All Noticed 🤔
Have you ever asked ChatGPT to write you five different jokes about the same topic, only to get the same punchline over and over again? Or requested creative ideas and received disappointingly similar responses?
You’re not imagining it. There’s a name for this phenomenon: mode collapse.
For years, AI researchers thought this was just the price we paid for safer, more aligned AI models. They believed that making AI “helpful and harmless” meant sacrificing creativity forever.
They were wrong. ✨
The Breakthrough Discovery 💡
In October 2025, a research team from Stanford University, Northeastern University, and West …
How Stanford Researchers Unlocked 2× More Diverse AI Outputs Without Retraining a Single Model
9 min readJust now
–
The Problem We’ve All Noticed 🤔
Have you ever asked ChatGPT to write you five different jokes about the same topic, only to get the same punchline over and over again? Or requested creative ideas and received disappointingly similar responses?
You’re not imagining it. There’s a name for this phenomenon: mode collapse.
For years, AI researchers thought this was just the price we paid for safer, more aligned AI models. They believed that making AI “helpful and harmless” meant sacrificing creativity forever.
They were wrong. ✨
The Breakthrough Discovery 💡
In October 2025, a research team from Stanford University, Northeastern University, and West Virginia University published a groundbreaking paper that changes everything we thought we knew about AI creativity.
The paper, titled “Verbalized Sampling: How to Mitigate Mode Collapse and Unlock LLM Diversity,” introduces a ridiculously simple technique that unlocks hidden creativity in ANY AI model — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other large language model (LLM).
No billion-dollar retraining required. No complex fine-tuning. Just eight words.