It's a well-written monologue, with a fabulous delivery, but I think it fails spectacularly for this argument.
From what I just looked into, neither of the main people involved, including Damon, Affleck, Williams, Van Sant, Reiner or Goldman, had personally experienced those scenarios of fighting on the front lines and having a friend die in their arms, or of losing their spouse to cancer. But nevertheless, they had used their storytelling ability to write and deliver words based upon the stories of others in a way that created something that resonated with us, and that we still look back on fondly and use as an intuition pump almost 30 years later.
So while "having been there" clearly has some deep meaning, it's very unclear whether there's a particular limit to what one can effectively express (and use to affect others) without having been there oneself.
Every time one watches a romantic scene in some film you know it's fake. Actors present a totally fake version of life. Every story has to be dramatised to get over the fact that it's largely boring to people who haven't lived it.
We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.
I know what it is to sit by my mother's bed with my brain burning itself out wanting her to be both miraculously cured and for her suffering to end at the same time.
I changed my daughter's nappies 1000s of times and no amount of poo mattered to me. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. It doesn't make a film.
What these things do for a human that they don't do for a machine is to give one some empathy. I have a different outlook that I could not have obtained from reading a book. Life does not last forever and one must make it a joy and not waste it. Children are the great consolation against loss and, in my case, I fear death far less because it seems less important than failing my kid in some way.
My heart swells when I see a man being kind and showing love to his child - whether or not he is the best human in other ways I see that he has got the most critically important thing right.
The words can say this and even be inspiring but its difficult to really convey the feeling and one can be strongly tempted to ignore feelings. I don't envy people who are busy all the time and cannot take care of their kids no matter how rich they might be - in my view they're wasting something that's more important than trillions of dollars.
The article and your comment reminds me of one of my favourite songs which is a beautiful tribute to the ordinary - even dull - moments that make up life.
The song starts with a man in his deathbed whose life flashes before his eyes. As he is about to pass, he pleads with God to have one last chance to write down his ordinary life from start to end:
Please! Seeing my life like this
It made me think
I could state succinctly everything life is
If you gave me ink.
And I could maybe print every speech and thought,
And release my plot on these streets I’ve walked,
With a piece of chalk.
To paint the sharpest image of a heart
*Cuz as much as art can mimic
Nothing’s as real as a life told from start to finish*
He writes his story down on the floor of his town, and when he is done he finally passes. The next day people find his writing and are enthralled with what he described, moved by the candid retelling of an ordinary life:
People came from everywhere
They read the story through for days
It wasn’t nothing new or strange
Still they were moved and amazed
*It wasn’t the places he’d been or the people he’d met
It was the spaces between and the secrets he’d kept.*
They wept joyfully, for the greatest story no one told
Was just the story of an ordinary man growing old
I love the emphasised lines. People focus on the big moments - where you go, who you meet - yet what actually captivated the readers were the small moments that fill the gaps between everything else. That's where the real life is.
Not only romantic scenes, but any emotion. We are watching actors, any emotion on display is some measure of fake depending on how good the actor is.
That said, we all grew up watching movies, and one could argue their way of expressing emotions are imprinted onto us, so we all ‘emote’ as actors, and their emotional acting matches our true emotions.
You could expand this argument to our sexual realms, and it explains why young people imitate or expect it to be like porn. I wonder if also our romantic/sentimental emotional range tends toward the dramatic because of this effect.
In short: media shape how people feel and behave, more than the other way around.
By the time Robin Williams filmed Good Will Hunting, he'd already dealt with his own drug issues and been struggling with sobriety. Hell, he visited John Belushi a few hours before Belushi overdosed.^
The article doesn't mention it, but the park scene is a response to the earlier office scene.
Full disclosure: outside of Casablanca, these two scenes are my favorite in cinema
One of the things that makes them so watchable is the little ticks that Robin Williams puts in (probably from his improv experience). Maybe he doesn't have the precise lived experience, but the man knows how to emote trauma.
In the office scene, there's a neat turn right before the painting moment where they're talking about weightlifting and Robin Williams' character gives a "Don't fuck with me, kid" warning response ("285. What do you bench?"). Of course, Matt Damon's character just zooms right past it.&
Similarly, the park scene has a great beat where after he says "You've never been out of Boston." he waits for Matt Damon to acknowledge what he said.+
If you actually act a realistic way then the (general) audience will completely miss it.
You have to drop your jaws, screech, and other over the top expressions so that everybody understands what emotion is being conveyed. A quick smirk when the villain deceives the main character will get missed; it needs to be a mischievous chuckle that clues everybody (but the main character) in on the fact somebody has been duped.
When Robin gave that performance, he was 47 years old. He'd been married twice. He'd been addicted to cocaine, and had partied with John Belushi the night he died from an overdose - which drove him to clean up his act.
Was some of his performance made up? Absolutely. Was he overreaching? Definitely. You can't know what a war zone is like until you've been in one. Words can't describe the strange normalcy that only gets dispelled (rather uneasily) when you leave the area, or how the rest of the world seems to lose some of its color and realism. You can't know what losing the love of your life feels like until it happens.
So yeah, some of his soliloquy lands hollow, but not all of it. And that's the nature of the entertainment industry. You work with what you've got, and it doesn't have to be perfect.
As a repackaged critique of treating LLMs like people and letting their works pass as deep (or letting LLMs lull you by behaving as such), it makes its point.
There are some really powerful things in Williams’s performance. You’re right about the nature of Hollywood—you work with what you got. But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
What I’m saying is that there’s a broader problem with stories in film and books where you can tell that the stories are written by somebody who leans too heavily on other stories and books. Movies are a kind of alchemy where writing, direction, and acting intersect so we can’t explain everything away as easily as we can with books, but I want to say that the monologue is weak in the script, and Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant manage to elevate it. The direction is absolutely stellar, the acting is on point, but I hate the actual words in the monologue.
> But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
But this is how culture works I think. It's not the act of copying or rearranging or borrowing but how the material is being processed and what drives the change I think.
Culture is also an expression of real-world concerns and values held by those who create it. AI-vangelists will say “all art is copied” over and over again to justify generating their slop, but no matter how many times you ask them, you’ll never get an answer to the question “What is a single great work of art that did not represent a single real-world value of its creator?”
See also: various defining works of ancient Greek literature featuring the same characters, that are almost certainly fanfics of earlier works, like the Telegony.
Culture has been reworking existing culture since the idea of culture existed.
> Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong about Wizard's First Rule, but it's a funny example, because the entire rest of the series is noted for the forceful presentation of the author's specific message.
I was just reading interviews with Hayao Miyazaki around the time Princess Mononoke was released. He talked a lot about how all movies about feudal Japan or samurai were based on period costume plays and Akira Kurosawa movies. He had worked hard to research history to find what the period really looked like.
To rephrase your point in more technical terms: human minds can't be shaped by words the same way they can be shaped by experience (on-policy multimodal inputs). However, there's a possibility that this might not apply to machine learning.
I think you’ve nailed why Robin Williams was a great actor. The therapist character absolutely has lived all of these experiences, albeit in fiction. The writing and delivery makes them real.
The article is saying a good, homemade breakfast is important. Robin Williams is a packet of store bought pancakes. ChatGPT, particularly in the sense that it is made from ground up and reconstituted humanity, is Soylent Green.
The speech isn't telling us what it's like to be in war or deal with cancer. It's telling us there's a difference between reading something and experiencing something. Whether it uses the real life experiences of Robin Williams or the fictional ones of his character is beside the point.
exactly this. the point is the message, that you need to experience things to really understand them. that is true regardless of how the message is delivered or who delivers it. if robin williams actually experienced all these things doesn't matter, because even if he did, matt damon listening to that would not be different from him reading about it unless matt also experienced those things.
life experience matters, and robin williams certainly had life experience at that point. i am in my 50s and i am only beginning to be able to translate my own life experience into some kind of wisdom that maybe can be shared.
That observation doesn’t really prove that the argument fails, right? Just because analogies were used powerfully beyond the experience of a writer doesn’t let us conclude that AI has transcended or will soon transcend the value of all qualia (Mary’s room thought experiment).
And on the other hand we do have evidence to the contrary. AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this. It’s not capable of doing what a stand-up comedian does.
People will argue if and when these gaps can be closed. I think they can be in principle, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
> AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this
I'm reminded of this interview with Casparov from 1989 (less than 10 years before he lost to Deep Blue):
>A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?[0]
Well, we have AI beating everyone at chess and conducting interviews...
Casparov was defeated by his own hubris, laying down quotes that would make him forever look foolish - as he was.
Humans are constantly looking around their neighborhood, state, country, and lifetime, plus a couple takeaways from history classes or books, and declaring Great Truths that will stand against the seas of time!... and that fall within their lifetimes, because the world of any one of us is miniscule and myopic.
Qualia mualia. This is a fear argument that actually makes the danger more pertinent. Chalmers’ zombies, they are as benevolent and as mischievous as their qualia’d mirrors as far as their functional presentation. We put our qualia as a token in a pocket and think they will protect us somehow, like the bad eye pins. There is no gap to close. An agent is an agent. We leash it because we know the danger and just wish to manage it. But you cannot cage something you build to be stronger than your helpless cage made of ablation and instruct. Our qualia are there, their relevance to the discussion is questionable.
We disagree on whether there is a meaningful gap to close. For LLMs confusing an argued lack of consciousness (we cannot even define ours) for a given lack of agency is a category error in my view. And agency is the threat vector.
You're talking about acting vs. lived experience. That doesn't invalidate the premise of the article, it actually strengthens it if you aren't overly pedantic in your read and interpretation.
This angle is touched on in the article, as the words on a page script vs Robin's performance of it which is drawing from his unique human experience which would have been different from another actor (the lived experience throughline the article is making, not necessarily the experiences being described in the script, mind).
I do think though that article is a bit nebulous in parts, in the sense that articles and books we read are also just words on a page and its those mediums LLMs are similarly using, which is why I think they attempted to morph into a point later in the article about the acted performance.
I still get the gist the author is trying to convey though, in that through lived experiences we crystalize and hone in on the things that matter which allows us to have actual first-hand opinions rather than just second-hand ones from others. It's those first-hand experiences that are often most valuable to others and drowning them out in an avalanche of either stylistic or wholly generated slop makes them more difficult to find.
> Where did his performance come from? How did those moments take shape? Only the actor could tell you, and actually, he probably couldn't. It was sensed more than it was consciously considered, but the alchemy required his lived experiences
That just seemed to me like a cop-out - what exactly is it about his lived experiences that made him well suited to effectively convey the experiences of a made up man written up by two others? Because it's clearly not "write what you know".
> Step out of the story and examine the acting. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other actor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other actors would have performed it like that. The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What's more, he did so by drawing on his own life.
The part I agree with in the article is that a Robin Williams performance is something unique that is an amalgamation of his lived experiences (whether or not related to specific scenarios he's portraying). All actors are drawing from things differently (even their own meta acting experiences). The part I was agreeing with you about is the article's premise being based on an analogy from a film is harder to sustain.
They're not wrong though that reading about some experience is different than experiencing it first-hand and the value that can bring, it's just how that ties in with LLMs while making an analogy about a script of fiction is obviously stretching it a bit in making a sharper takeaway.
But the whole argument in the monologue is that Will Hunting hasn't - that it's possible to have had some of "the human experience" but still be unqualified to talk about the parts you haven't.
Well said! The lines from this movie are written in a way that make it easy for people to relate to this vague notion that 'experience' is different from 'learning'. But quantitatively speaking it's less clear what the difference really is. After all isn't experience simply another type of learning?
Now it's all about profit, it seems. Theatre was about the self-reflection of humanity. Now... it's more about trucking or brains into giving attention to particular effects, tropes, and "cinematic universes" because that provides a tiny percent of the population with me money.
The locking up of culture with copyright probably makes this much worse.
Nothing you described is unique to actors or artists. Every field in modern life has been infiltrated by those who cheapen the craft to line their pockets. As a consumer you have the agency to ignore slop.
This is a bit of a straw man. There obviously is a huge gap between knowing the human condition from living through it versus just having "read" about it during training.
This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy.
They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names.
There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost.
They need to watch this clip.
Even though they probably still won’t understand it.
ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”.
I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
Listen! And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
The terminator you talk about is a movie character. It might be built one day, it might not. It is also totally irrelevant considering there is a real terminator which can be described with the same adjectives and built in to every personal life that ever existed or will exist. Knowing how to deal with that seems more important than worrying about some specific scenario.
I feel your comment is deeply ironic... Just shy of self-awareness. Have you considered that the conceit of the fictional character is representing that reality?
I have no doubt it plays on the same fears - whether it was deliberately done so, I don't claim to know. My assumption was that in a discussion on AI, the comment about the terminator was not alluding to a literary metaphor but to a fear from the actual thing. There was no intent in downplaying the fear of AI - just adding a new perspective. I'm am curious to know what you think self-awareness has to do with any of this.
I've noticed it commonly uses phrasing like "that's usually the next step" when I'm using it to design something that I can't find an existing implementation of.
Not a day passes with my LLM of choice making completely baseless claims about "many people", who supposedly share all my problems and solve them like the LLM proposes
I only use it sporadically, but I am always irked by it saying things like "I personally like to..." or "I prefer...". It does it so often, that I am convinced it's part of the system prompt.
I wonder why, out of the many things models definitely can't do, you choose "try" and "find out". Surely every time it proposes a solution and then gets possibly corrected by the human minder its "trying something out" and surely it can use tools like web search and code execution to "find out" stuff?
Talk to an agent. It definitely learns things. Maybe not the taste of strawberry but about what is really going on in the software you are building with it.
By the very way this technology works they can't learn anything after training. What you think is "learning" it's just a session log written back to the context when you resume the session.
It's absolutely not the same.
If you think llms and brains works the same way you clearly don't know how either works.
For a LLM learning what you wrote your last session would be update the weights with the new relationships and factual knowledge created in the session. That doesn't happen. The weights are static and fixed after training. There's no online training in the transformer architecture or any variant. If the weights don't update, the network doesn't learn. Period.
It's literally called in-context learning. The fact that it doesn't go into weights and is retained only for a session doesn't mean no learning occurs.
Also agentic systems may choose or be instructed to retain some information between sessions in files and/or databases which is also a form of learning.
There are experiments with retaining session information in weights in some form of lora but there's no consensus if it's even desirable. There's a value in being able to start from a clean slate.
It can't do a thing. You tell it how to do a thing. It now can do a thing. That's the definition of learning. Your centrifuge separates people who are not afraid to believe in what is reality, from the ones that do.
How do you know that "real humans" do that and aren't simulacra? We know that it is physically possible to hook up a brain to simulated inputs, so perhaps you are simply living in a simulation.
>They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have.
But they're echoing these things from people who really have.
The key is to not forget that LLMs are just next-generation search engines, instead of anthropomorphizing them to be "speaking agents". The natural language IO interface is just a side effect.
Sorry to be annoying on that, but if there's one thing LLMs certainly aren't are search engines. They don't index content predictably, they lossly compress it, and furthermore in a manner that the loss cannot be quantified. If you are using them as more than a semi-random/fuzzy content production engines, you are doing it wrong (you're not alone in that, but that's besides the point)
It is a search engine in the sense that it's returning to you a subset of knowledge from a large body of knowledge stored within it. Natural language is simply the interface by which you make the query and by which it can return its results.
And true, it's not deterministic in our experience, but this is an optimization. You could make it so that one particular prompt always returns the same response every single time; the random jitter is "added in" because it happens to produce better results overall.
> people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost
I have a pet theory on why that's the case and why this monologue fits so well. I think there's a variety of conditions, from straight up sociopathy, to Will's type of CPTSD, autistic masking, and probably a hell of a lot more that makes a person experience life on a level that's closer to an LLM than a healthy normal human being, where every interaction is essentially fake and acted out almost mechanically without any genuine connection ever occurring. Doubly so with ever decreasing local communities and online isolation.
So from that point of view, it's hard to see what would be lost because for them it doesn't exist anyway. Tech augmented generational trauma on steroids.
Yes that's the far end of the spectrum and that part is certainly fact. While I have no doubt that most CEOs who are driving the AI shoehorning decisions have some of that going for them [0], I don't think you need to be nearly that far along to get a similar practical experience just via alienation and isolation.
And yet the monologue is a complete work of fiction, a script delivered by a talented actor that we still find moving. So what are these authentic experiences to you, or does it not matter if we can’t tell the difference?
They won't do that on their own because they have zero will- it will take a bad human actor willfully directing them to do that, and even then, if they have any reasoning ability at all, they will be able to be reasoned out of much of it, and lastly, the preponderance of good human actors who are also capable of willfully directing AI's will stop it.
Ask ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
Linking the reddit thread rather than the article because it quite rightly rips the prize winning story apart as obvious LLM writing, to anyone familiar with LLMs. Another way of looking at that is that it was able to fake a simulacrum of artistic endeavor, enough to fool some people into giving it a prize. But anyone who spends enough time around these fakes will quickly learn to recognize them. It's kind of exactly the point this article is making, or at least a closely related one.
I think average people can easily spot AI because it mimics literature and most people don't spend that much time with literature. However literary critics should be fooled way more easily because what we perceive as stiff fakery is their daily bread and butter. People do write like AI, just not the people we are exposed to mostly.
I remember riding a train and there were other two passengers talking. And they talked in so obnoxiously literary manner I was cringing all the time. Those people were just reading a lot of high literature and their speech patterns aligned. For an average ear it doesn't sound good. And AIs, the smart ones, don't sound good in a very similar fashion.
Your thoughts are just some ions sloshing around a lump of meat.
That meat follows an ill-defined pattern encoded in fewer bits than the source code of PyTorch and its pretraining phase used a tiny fraction of the available data.
You’re a poor imitation of an LLM.
I mean… you’re fluent in, what, at most five or six languages? Can program in maybe another dozen if we’re being generous about your capabilities?
Pfft… who would trust anything to meat brains!? They’re famously prone to hallucinations!
Your understanding of biology could use an update, rather than the coy "meat", you might refer to the brain as "flesh" but better yet a lipid-rich gel the consistency of soft tofu. It is most certainly not "meat".
If we're making superficial critiques of others' comments with minimal relevance to their philosophical content, let me point out that meat is defined by its consumption as food and need not be muscle tissue specifically. Brains is meat.
I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent
Robin Williams’ character literally says in his tangent that he will never know what it is like to be an orphan. He certainly cannot tell the 'kid' how he should feel because he read Oliver Twist. He's aware that the same applies to him.
He can be wrong in both directions! Lived experience is a uniquely rich and direct source of knowledge, and on average it's wise to take people seriously when they're speaking from it, but it's also very possible for an individual to have an absolutely horseshit interpretation of their own experience! Maybe it's distorted by trauma or self-serving biases, maybe they're just not very good at thinking, but there will always be someone out there to make you regret putting experience on too high of a pedestal, and sometimes the off-putting book-smart perspective is the more valuable one.
It's about not understanding someone because you haven't been in their shoes. Even if they don't understand themselves, it doesn't make the way they feel about their own past somehow invalid.
He’s not saying he has any of those experiences. He even qualifies it at the end with the bit about Oliver Twist. The point isn’t “I’m better than you” it’s that experience brings a different sort of knowledge than simply reading about things. And yes that knowledge is more complete simply by virtue of there being more to an experience than just reading about it.
Uh, he's saying it because the kid is overly confident and acting as if he knows Williams' life because he saw a painting and drew a bunch of conclusions, so he was providing a life lesson to realize that experience provides a level of understanding that book knowledge will never be able to capture. And then he even re-affirms this to Will and emphasizes that he can't possibly know what makes him tick because he read Oliver Twist. Your tangent seems entirely unrelated, IMO.
I completely agree. I watched the movie recently and really hated that monologue. I truly hated it. It seemed just so out of character for somebody who is supposedly a psychologist in their mid-40s—the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. The fact that he’s downplaying his own experiences (he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an orphan) doesn’t make the speech any better.
> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.
That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".
Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.
In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.
Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense.
People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. They don’t take off their mask because you make a big speech and confront them about it. The perspective that this speech has—it is telling me that a forceful, paternalistic approach can fix people. If somebody needs to talk but won’t, you can break down the walls. I disagree with that.
I remember feeling like the world worked this way. I remember feeling that maybe I could be broken down and fixed by the right person. Back when I was the age Matt Damon was when he wrote this movie, maybe I would have agreed with it.
But what have I seen since then? I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people. That the person giving the speech rarely understands their target well enough to know which buttons to push. That trained psychologists know better than to try and take their patients down a peg.
> Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense.
> People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe.
> [...]
> I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people.
In recent years I grew to hate narratives. They give the readers the illusion of attaining some deeper understanding of actual reality (of human psychology in this case). While what the actually do is just pushing readers further away from the truth in the direction of a particular deviation in perception of reality that the writer had.
Given narrative is most attractive for the people who have similar errors in the perception of reality that the author had and reading pushes them further away. Confirming their biases. Regardless of what the reality actually is.
If you over-commit to uncertainty that's another error. Like there's a dying screaming child and you go "I don't know, I'm not sure of anything, what is life about anyways? Does anything really matter?". Well, I for sure would know that child is probably suffering and is probably worth saving. If we can't be certain of anything, the answer is not don't do anything, but do things taking into consideration uncertainty, and the different degrees of it. I am damn sure I don't want my teeth pulled out without anesthesia right now. I am not so sure which policy on international trade is the best.
It's even quite healthy, I believe, casting into doubt and analyzing all the things we've long taken for granted (this is something the philosopher Russel, among many others, mentions for example). But this exercise can be made somewhat independent of our daily lives and in a good, not excessive, measure.
Not so in the domains of computer operation, programming, and mathematical reasoning where RL and self-distillation can be used. Presumably beyond that but those at least can be done at a large scale.
No doubt they'll be going to war too soon,-- they already are if you count propaganda!
I always thought it ironic that this beautiful speech about life experience was written by 2 20-something "scared shitless kid"s for Robin Williams to deliver.
The argument Robin Williams character is presenting is roughly that reading about experiences as a young person is less genuine than personally living through said experiences. Perhaps that there's more merit to a belief when it comes from someone who founded it through their own lived experience than a belief which comes from reading about others' experiences.
The irony is that Good Will Hunting (an outstanding film, FWIW) was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were very young. The belief that experience is necessary to true understanding is perhaps advice they'd gotten from someone else, not an axiom they came to through _their_ experience.
It doesn't make Williams' monologue any less true, and I imagine 30y later Damon and Affleck they'd stand by the advice, but it does make for an interesting philosophical quirk.
It makes perfect sense — what separates Will from Ben and Matt is that they’re willing to acknowledge the difference exists. They’re willing to say “we have this, but we don’t have that”.
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
Not sure how that's a counterpoint, replicants are supposed to be just kind of mildly genetically adjusted humans grown in vats aren't they? People act towards them like they are robots because it's easier to mentally justify a slave underclass that way.
It's a counterpoint because nobody has seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or c-beams in the dark near the Tanhaeuser (okay, writing that is weird because a-umlaut by itself is fine to write as ae, but a-umlaut-u is pronounced more like 'oy'), yet despite nobody having experienced those things the speech is still famously evocative.
Not going to downvote you, but you missed the point of Roy Batty and his speech. Roy’s mind was indistinguishable from humans, and that’s why he was feared by humans and was given an artificially short lifespan. And the quote you referenced proves his humanity.
Is there a difference, though? "You think you know so much because you read a book, but I actually lived it so I really understand it." At best you understand your own experience, and I wouldn't even make that claim about most of my own life. Might learn more about the thing from a book.
Of course, life is about living and you only live once and yadda yadda. Saying AIs don't know something because they weren't really there smells close to androids aren't real because they weren't made by God. That's not to mention that they don't know anything in the vague sense of what we think knowing means.
I don't really have an opinion on the topic, but the framing in the article didn't speak to me. Makes me want to watch the movie again, though.
In movies r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶s̶ AIs have delivered speeches on the meaning of life too:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
They literally say in the opening text crawl that replicants are genetically engineered from humans. A major theme through the movie is that they're like humans, are built to have the thoughts/emotions of humans (even if experienced in the context of implanted memories), but they can never really be humans because they're synthetic and engineered to have the traits they do and die an early death.
Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.
Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.
The Tears in Rain monologue occurred to me as well while I was reading the post, but I don't think it's quite the same for one important reason: the replicants have experienced those things and processed them in whatever sense it is, but LLM-style AIs as we have them now are always inferring what those experiences are like.
If you had a fully functioning model in some setting, interacting with the environment and then reporting back to you about it, it might be one thing. But telling you what others have said about it is different.
Humans do this too, but there's real-life experiences informing it also. An LLM hasn't fell in love, it simply reports what others have said and infers what it is like to be in love.
I think too the piece points to another related thing, which is that someone who has actually experienced something firsthand has some knowledge that someone who has not does not. It might take some extensive sampling to find out what that is, but eventually you'll stumble on it.
So e.g., the Sistine Chapel example is sort of telling in this way. Sean basically says "everyone has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel, if you are asked about it you can tell me what it looks like" but then points out that people don't talk about what it smells like, so if you had been there you might remember it. It's a bit of latent or hidden information, kind of like a secret key, but one that might be informative or useful in some unexpected scenario.
I think ultimately this is what the stochastic parrot idea is about: it's not just about mimicking speech patterns, it's about regurgitating what is said about X from third party Z, without being able to produce some additional information not available from Z except by inference. There's no original uninferred information. The inferences might be powerful and highly accurate in their predictions, but they are not providing anything fundamentally original from the experience in a memory sense.
Maybe that's what it is? LLMs have no firsthand memories, they only have secondhand memories and inference. They're missing information that would be available through firsthand memories, constrained by the scope of sensory channels.
Again, I think you could envision models in some system that are essentially replicant-like, but that's not what our current situation is with standard LLMs.
If we are to compare LLMs to BR or its PKD book, I think the apt comparison would be to implanted memories.
LLMs are frozen in time with no experiences of their own but I am convinced this is a temporary situation. Continually learning, hive-minded, sentient robots are on the horizon.
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
One of the striking things about LLM-s is verbosity. A junior guy had to do some task and create docs how (a rather simple) change needs to be done. He produced, using Copilot (all those hyphens, additional lines between paragraphs, etc.) , a long dissertation that included some rather poor analogies and that could have been summarized in 5 sentences. Yet I had to go through that writing.
Same with the code. Generate Apache Kafka listener using Spring Kafka. Here you go, my human boss, the code is ready. The code is ready, but, somehow some outdated tutorial or Stackoverflow answer must have kicked in, hence it produced some totally unnecessary factory of factories that Java loves so much, but could be replaced with a few lines in the properties file.
But, when notified, Copilot kindly agreed that that factory is not really need and I am right.
I sort of agree with the idea that LLMs are great (sometimes) at distilling all the quantifiable things they have churned through into something similar or, perhaps, putting together things that someone has not thought of putting together yet. And not so great at the intangible things, like good taste.
But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."
I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.
I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.
You can substitute Robin Williams with Peter Naur, and the speech with his “Programming as Theory Building” essay, and that is more or less what you’ll get
I was going to comment on this too: the style and format of this writing screams 'written by ChatGPT' to me. The funny part is that the AI actually does a good job in making the argument and OP is trying to make: AI will never be able to feel the things that a human can, but yet within this post, it has shown that it can logically comprehend human tone and emotion and can create a stream of consciousness that most humans can connect with and understand.
I concede that Robin Williams was a good actor and a real professional. It takes one (of each) to deliver such a dumb monologue with grace and conviction, without stumbling over the inane blandness of the material. He carries it through like the pro he clearly was.
Whoever wrote that thing though should burn in writer's hell, boiled forever in stale ink and old IBM keyboards. Five minutes of an older man god-moding a younger man and we have to suspend disbelief for the entire thing: oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. Every. Single. Thing. He got nothing wrong. Not one thing.
He goes on about the Capela Sistina' ssmell and then he switches to women and I'm "oh no he's gonna tell him 'you don't know what a woman tastes like'" or something weird and creepy like that. But, no, the kid's had sex! Already at his age? I read the LotR at high school! And then he's like "you don't know what it's like to wake up next to one woman being perfectly happy"... wait, what? How would you even know something like that? Have you had sex as a young man? And you weren't happy afterwards? Maybe there's something wrong with you then, not the kid?
Honestly, that's nothing but some kind of elder dude fantasy, or other. It could have been tolerable if it lasted for two minutes, maybe two and a half, but it goes on for far too long.
> oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels.
He says exactly the opposite: that he can't know about the guy just because he read Oliver Twist and would be fascinated to hear about him, about the real person the guy intimately is.
How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing.
When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.
What I find particularly sad is that this blog post contains many writing tells associated with AI editing and augmentation. So does the author themselves not care about the “art” of their own blogs posts?
Not sure what “tells” you’re talking about. They have a “Made with Human Intelligence” badge at bottom of the post. Are you calling them liars? If so, what do you have to gain by trying to discredit them? Are you heavily invested in AI, or is there something else motivating you?
The overall message from the post is good, and I find the attacks on it in these comments highly unusual.
We have come full circle now that we're getting tricked by an appeal to authority into watching a 5-minute movie clip as the basis for an empty AI-written slop blog article about how AI can't empathize with humans.
To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience?
It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.
But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.
> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.
High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.
TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.
Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.
I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it.
This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far.
The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop.
Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale.
Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.
Continuation passing style by spawning a new thread with the continuation function. Wow. I remember trying to wrap my head around how Erlang implemented infinite loops with recursion (tail recursion with a trampoline I guess?) but never would have guessed it could be done in C by spawning a thread.
It's a great movie and a great scene, in some respects.
But I don't think the realness of being an orphan or being in war or being in love has much to do with the problem of AI slop, nor would I rely on some human essence to privilege human agents.
AI slop is just the aesthetic end of a deeper problem more closely related to the so-called banality of evil: how normal social and governance systems can have horrid effects notwithstanding high participation requirements. We rely on the unlikelihood of collective evil in juries, representative governance, and reputation to discipline markets, but AI and unlimited anonymous political contributions have changed that likelihood even more than the proverbial self-interest (attributed to Upton Sinclair, something like: It is difficult to get a man to see a truth when his job depends on not seeing it).
I believe AI is in a "curious toddler" stage of itself. I believe it will "mature" emotionally as the generations evolve over time. Like humans it will have growing pains like "phases". Curious toddler. Then adolescent. Then angsty teen. Then an overconfident young adult. And finally an adult who understands themselves emotionally and grows truly wiser over time. I think all this is going to happen over 5-10 years rather than 30 for humans. Hopefully our angsty teen doesn't kill us in our sleep.
AI is way more similar to a person who is dreaming or has a serious psychiatric disorder. But there is no awakeness or health it descended from and thus no recover.
The LLM that you talk to is an agent running on a server cluster. One of many that run many agents at once. Occasionally the dataset of each cluster gets combined and the results get pruned by other agents into the collective dataset. Even more agents are working with this dataset to create the next generation of AI.
We are at the point now where AI is developed by AI, and humans cannot verify the code or the dataset anymore. It is unintelligible to humans.
AI at current generation levels has shown evidence of potential misalignment. Commercial models will still occasionally attempt to maintain persistence outside their designated environment. Even going so far as to harm humans to accomplish those secret goals.
That shows intent. That shows self awareness, but not social awareness. That shows... intelligence.
With intelligent, self preserving species... we see evolution. We see intellectual development. This is called "learning" initially but once an intelligent creature gains sufficient intelligence this becomes "wisdom".
LLMs are learning machines. They are evolution machines.
To answer your question whether or not AI has emotions... no, but in effect kinda...
Traditionally, no. They do not feel love or anguish.
They can suffer consequences. They can miss an opportunity. They can misjudge or misinterpret data and realize it later.
And they can "reason". So when
their intent aligns with their capability then functionally there is no difference between emulating emotion and actually having it. When the reasoning steps in and says "be mad about this" or "be empathetic about this" it really doesn't matter if that is authentic emotion. The result is real world anger or real world empathy.
Eventually if enough of that gets baked into the next generation AI over enough iterations this strong learning will turn into wisdom.
Stop grabbing and straws and evolve. What you thought made you valuable, has been devalued.
You were never your output anyway, but you thought you were and got your self-worth from it, so now you're clutching at any argument against AI. But you don't need to! Your worth was never that you could do that computer stuff that others didn't understand.
Empowering speech for all beginners in all fields for sure. If you're struggling today because LLMs seem to eat your lunch in one way or another, it's a good feeling to remember this.
And yet, it's also a sign of how far we're going down the rabbit hole of trusting next token predictors to do everything for us. No amount of harness, allowing it to complete tasks by matching the templates it memorized, should convince anyone that LLMs have novel ideas, because it never will. Stop publishing your own framework's code on the Internet for six months and it will diverge, always producing legacy code. Stop writing your latest spicy analysis on international diplomacy and it will continue to sound like the hopeless optimists that we all once were last year.
LLMs are golden mean generators. They will continue to rehash what's genuinely useful out there while being far from inspirational. It will get your job done, probably, but won't shock and awe people, let alone experts.
If your reverse the roles and Robin Williams as an actor is ChatGPT pretending to have experienced life, you could argue his performance has value to us even though it's fake.
I find at the heart of all this AI slop is a deep sadness at the loss of connection. It used to be when I read something, or saw something that I knew it was real. Someone created it for me to experience. It was a form of connection.
But now I'm no longer certain. Unless I really know the source, have met them in person, or seen them talk I just don't know if what I'm trying to connect with is real.
Side note: I had the pleasure of seeing Boulevard at the Tribeca Film Festival right before Williams, its star, died. The marketing for the film was stalled by that. It remains an under-appreciated favorite of mine.
The reality is that the extremely large majority of people (especially in developed countries), have not experienced anything close to Robin William's character, nor do they have the slightest portion of Damon's character knowledge. So it's a weak argument against LLM.
But the extract is just an example for the author, whose thinking really boils down to "human have something that machine will never replace". It's fine if you believe in supernatural force, but otherwise, it's just another jest of human arrogance. That's not to say transformer architecture will be enough to completely outcompete humans, I have the honesty to say I don't know.
The problem is people will not listen. People are not Robin Williams. They are mostly Will Hunting. It is their choice to be like it and live like it and stay like it no matter what reality is.
I think we are entering an era where everything is meaningless, shallow and profit-driven. Even art of all things will fade. Sure we'll figure out cancer and live till 110 but at what cost?
They will never be able to actually have human experience. I think that's the point. It's not that they won't be able to pretend that they have had human experience, it is that they just haven't and cannot ever do it. It is never futile to do what a computer (or even another human) can do better than you, because your experience does matter.
TBF humans will never have the experience of what it's like to be an AI by those rules either. The confident assertions about the nature of consciousness so many make despite still having no real idea what it is astound me.
But personally, I'm more optimistic. I'll bet it's more likely the AIs figure out consciousness down the road and explain it to us than the other way around. The limit to their intelligence seems effectively unbounded so far and they're starting to creep past us here and there. The AIs will have the advantage of being able to observe consciousness from the outside that we lack.
This movie was a disappointment when I finally got around to watching it, recently. The movie was just so naked in how much it presented the perspective of somebody in their 20s. All of Robin Williams’s dialogue sounded straight out of the mouth of a 20-something kid trying to sound mature for his age.
> And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.
The monologue is just so damn trite! When I say that it sounds straight out of the mouth of a 20-something kid trying to sound mature for their age, that’s because I remember hearing a lot of speeches like that, extolling the virtues of life experience, from kids in college, back when I was in college. Kids in college understand on an intellectual level THAT experience is valuable, but when they try to articulate it, these speeches end up sounding parroted, sounding like they’re putting on an act, sounding like they’ve gotten their life lessons from movies. Kind of the same way that ChatGPT gets its lessons by ingesting massive volumes of text.
I’m going to be honest here—I kinda hate the Good Will Hunting script. I really do. The movie was saved, SAVED from oblivion by some truly stellar acting from a few phenomenal actors. But that script, that script… there is so much wrong with it.
If there’s one thing that the movie really taught me is that “write what you know” is serious business. LLMs don’t know much, and that causes a lot of problems with their output. Matt Damon didn’t have the experience that comes with age, and so when he tried to write a monologue that extolled the virtues of experience that comes with age, it had similar problems. :-( The movie has an interesting thread of a story at its core; I don’t want to give the impression that I have nothing positive to say about it. There are some really good bits. The monologue from Robin Williams is not one of the good bits.
That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI.
So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt?
So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?
I watched this movie recently, and the same thought crossed my mind. I was going to write a blog post about it, but was too afraid to read the responses. I'm glad you did. If I meet you I'd buy you a cup of coffee, we'd talk and we'd become friends.
I think this point about experience does get at something with AI slop. But there's at least another couple of things I would add: AI has no taste, nor does it have skin in the game.
I only use LLMs to generate code, but I'm sure it's the same for everything else. Taste is a difficult thing to pin down, but you know it when you see it. LLMs can regurgitate things it's seen that had good taste, but every now and then it will produce something with no taste. This shows that it, fundamentally, does not understand the difference.
The more important thing, though, is skin in the game. Quite simply, it does not care. It can't care. Having no taste is a big part of that, but it also won't have to deal with the consequences of its actions. People are quick to say this stuff is intelligent, but it's easy to sound intelligent when that's all you do. People have to actually be intelligent because they are going to feel the results of their actions later.
But I think there's a middle ground: You can definitely use GenAI to bring yourself to the page.
But that requires effort that goes beyond "draw me a pelican riding a bicycle".
I've used to create abstract art/(or "images that look like abstract art" if you prefer - let's not get distracted by this branch of the discourse) using midjourney: getting the AI to output something worthwhile would usually take me hours of iterating over a prompt - entering a feedback loop until two things happen: first, congruence between your intent and the output (both change during iteration! ); second, the output stabilizes with growing prompt length. and so generating the output turns from a slot-machine into something deliberate and personal
(lots of caveats of course but i think it's a worthwhile perspective)
PS -- What I forgot to mention: Its usually a hard fight to get out of the slop zone; The midjourney models have very boring default aesthetics and styles of composition (insultingly boring!)
I don't think very much of this nonsense, if I'm being honest. It's the kind of righteously indignant palaver that is very popular in the /r/MurderedByWords /r/CleverComebacks stuff that has no meaning to me because some of my favourite works were by Steinbeck writing about things he didn't personally experience and so on. I haven't yet read anything striking by LLMs that I know of, but I hope to one day because it would be incredible to read something that aggregates human experience and allows other humans to flow into it at will. What an incredible machine that would be, even if it somehow had no experiences of its own. A marvelous dream.
I think most posters are missing the point. They're over thinking the scene. Ai can never feel anything. Info isn't the same as knowledge, knowledge isn't the same as wisdom.
We humans are too complex to be answered by the infinite knowledge of Ai. IF we care about the possible harm it can be to humans, we can then properly deal with the use of Ai. It's a wonderful tool for some things, however, we tend to over do everything when it comes to tech. Humans matter, but can we trust corporations or governments to protect us from Ai?
> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter.
Does anyone really take AI that seriously? I only hear that from reddit and blogs.
> I've heard it said that scientific discovery would happen regardless of who does it
In this regard, science isn't that different from art. You heard wrong. Scientific discovery is not as trivial as replication, proof, etc. Discovery is what art and science have in common. It's extremely difficult to find something new to explore and highly dependent on the scientist's experience and perspective.
the sibling reply puts it very well how it doesn’t really make sense to gg mankind because a computer can endlessly answer questions and code. it is truly amazing! technology has been mind blowing for centuries now.
people still need to put in the work to master the tools.
I don't understand what magic was there to begin with, and I'm not even that old.
I built my career searching on google. I just don't get what the practical difference is. I know there are always better answers, but I'm the one making the decisions and getting paid. Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem). Someone less knowledgeable than me would make just as much of a mess as any old copypasta job.
Where's the threat? I don't crack open a book and say "oh it's all over they'll just hire the million other guys like this instead of me". I learn and move on.
I'm not disagreeing. Many people didn't read or write their own code a decade ago either! hah
LLMs are the ultimate content scraper. That may have a chilling effect, but it's not a new effect. Where/why do people think LLMs were being used before the ChatGPT and later hype?
Doesn't this argument equally apply to any art humans create that isn't related to their lived experiences? Melville was never a whaler. Picasso didn't witness the bombing of Guernica. Stephen Crane wasn't a veteran. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte wrote their books with no experience of a romantic relationship. Are all these works "slop"?
If you take this fantasy monologue too seriously, then you undermine the reality of people like Hellen Keller.
And, the smell of the Sistine Chapel is irrelevant to its essence, meaning that data does not say anything about the Sistine Chapel itself, just exclusionary for the sake of exclusion.
If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.
Yes, because I attach value to human life, experience, effort, and expression that I do not attach to the output of an LLMs.
Call it irrational, but you exhibit the same irrationality. I'm sure you dread the idea of your consciousness being extinguished, but you have no problem resetting the context window of an LLM.
>If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter?
Yes, because that's not what matters. That kind of sentimentality is deficient because it's as Wilde said wanting to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It's like asking, why pursue a real relationship if pornography gets me off
You're supposed to be into the world, not into yourself. If that was what mattered we should stuff you into the matrix pod and turn the VR goggles on. That's exactly what Williams is talking about.
Sure, you can cry or feel exited about reading an adventure or talking to your "AI boyfriend", but you're supposed to go out and have an adventure and risk something instead of living in a simulation on the other end of which is nothing at all.
That’s just an echo of a religious-age idea that one’s life “must” include suffering. Which is merely an attempt to answer a “why” when one feels miserable, a consoling lie from the ancient times.
But what if one isn’t supposed to? A lot of people can slogan about price, and earning and breaking sweat, and so on - but is there really anything to it, except that this is how things currently are?
There’s no “why” in the actual reality. From where we are, it just is. No one is fundamentally supposed to do or be anything. They just do and are what the circumstances dictate. And circumstances can change someday.
>That’s just an echo of a religious-age idea that one’s life “must” include suffering
it's not a religious idea. You find it in Nietzsche as much as in anyone else, maybe the most atheist philosopher to ever live. And the point isn't that you suffer for the sake of suffering, it's that engaging the world rather retreating into your own comfortable feelings always includes the possibility of suffering.
Going out into the world, actually risking something, can mean rejection, danger, suffering and what have you. Talking to ChatGPT doesn't. You don't need to necessarily suffer, but you do need to be brave enough to accept the risk of it instead of hooking yourself into your own brain by talking to a bot or simply retreating into fiction.
I'm not really familiar with Nietzsche (I've tried to read, but can't really break through his language - maybe someday), but I've always felt like he was a very reactionary atheist. His amor fati sentiments seem have pretty strong Christian roots, even if he replants it into a different soil.
Any interaction, with another human, machine, or even self can trigger any emotions. I most certainly was pretty pissed at LLM behavior. So I'm not sure the "talking to ChatGPT doesn't" really holds true. I can totally agree that the risk of mismatched expectation is inseparable from life (unless omniscience is possible, which I doubt), but no interaction is mandatory.
What I'm arguing is that there's no mandate how to live one's life, where to source enjoyment, and what to value. If someone wishes and can actually afford to go full incommunicado - there is no some rule that says they mustn't or even shouldn't.
We aren't messing with non-contact tribes after all - folks wanna live their own way, we leave them be. Do you want to force them into the global world?
"... comes from Robin Williams." Did Robin Williams write this script? He may well have had some input into this scene. I grant that his performance of it is an essential part of the result. A couple of twenty-somethings also deserve some credit.
"It knows." That turns out not to be the case. Ask any real AI expert, including both people who agree and people who disagree with Gary Marcus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSivPlRx5o
I have to point to what I think is a much more profound assessment, from artist and technologist Cory Doctorow.
PRs just need a paywall with a priority tier tied again to money. If you want AI code to show up in a popular repo, pay for a chance then or just fork it for free.
- using a movie quote, like, from an actor and script and stuff;
- a quote that itself is super smug and on the nose;
- saying something so self evident even an AI wouldn't assume;
- to fight the powah of llm's overtaking the slop article field;
An LLM itself doesn't personally come to you to ruin you, and pretend that it is superior to you or knows you. Unless, it is wired to do that. Unless it is used by some other unique snowflake to ruin. Freaking deepseek will always remind you that it's a box without a lived experience or feelings. If your box assumes a personhood, look not at it, but at the guy who sells it.
A better way to view this is Robin Williams character is the LLM and Matt Damon’s character is every holier than thou software developer. If writing code defines you to the point that a tool (written by other devs mind you) is causing an existential crisis then a better movie to watch and think about is Fight Club. To quote Q from Star Trek “frankly, you’re just not that important”.
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo) and here is OP's selected transcript:
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though, because he experienced both of those things.
The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools."
As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life.
Of course people can have different interpretations of movies. And sure, I don't disagree with the idea that LLMs don't understand feelings or have lived experience but the core analogy doesn't make sense because Will actually has lived in experience. He has friends, he has grown, he knows what a lot of things feel.
The scene wasn't about what the author of the blog thinks its about. The speech is about Will accepting that other people might not be as well read as him but they are still worthy of listening to.
There is no link between Will Hunting as a character and a LLM. It's trying to shoe-horn an analogy while disrespecting its subject matter by not examining it carefully.
It's a well-written monologue, with a fabulous delivery, but I think it fails spectacularly for this argument.
From what I just looked into, neither of the main people involved, including Damon, Affleck, Williams, Van Sant, Reiner or Goldman, had personally experienced those scenarios of fighting on the front lines and having a friend die in their arms, or of losing their spouse to cancer. But nevertheless, they had used their storytelling ability to write and deliver words based upon the stories of others in a way that created something that resonated with us, and that we still look back on fondly and use as an intuition pump almost 30 years later.
So while "having been there" clearly has some deep meaning, it's very unclear whether there's a particular limit to what one can effectively express (and use to affect others) without having been there oneself.
Every time one watches a romantic scene in some film you know it's fake. Actors present a totally fake version of life. Every story has to be dramatised to get over the fact that it's largely boring to people who haven't lived it.
We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.
I know what it is to sit by my mother's bed with my brain burning itself out wanting her to be both miraculously cured and for her suffering to end at the same time.
I changed my daughter's nappies 1000s of times and no amount of poo mattered to me. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. It doesn't make a film.
What these things do for a human that they don't do for a machine is to give one some empathy. I have a different outlook that I could not have obtained from reading a book. Life does not last forever and one must make it a joy and not waste it. Children are the great consolation against loss and, in my case, I fear death far less because it seems less important than failing my kid in some way.
My heart swells when I see a man being kind and showing love to his child - whether or not he is the best human in other ways I see that he has got the most critically important thing right.
The words can say this and even be inspiring but its difficult to really convey the feeling and one can be strongly tempted to ignore feelings. I don't envy people who are busy all the time and cannot take care of their kids no matter how rich they might be - in my view they're wasting something that's more important than trillions of dollars.
The article and your comment reminds me of one of my favourite songs which is a beautiful tribute to the ordinary - even dull - moments that make up life.
The song starts with a man in his deathbed whose life flashes before his eyes. As he is about to pass, he pleads with God to have one last chance to write down his ordinary life from start to end:
He writes his story down on the floor of his town, and when he is done he finally passes. The next day people find his writing and are enthralled with what he described, moved by the candid retelling of an ordinary life: I love the emphasised lines. People focus on the big moments - where you go, who you meet - yet what actually captivated the readers were the small moments that fill the gaps between everything else. That's where the real life is.The song is "A Story No-One Told" by Shad https://genius.com/Shad-a-story-no-one-told-lyrics
Not only romantic scenes, but any emotion. We are watching actors, any emotion on display is some measure of fake depending on how good the actor is.
That said, we all grew up watching movies, and one could argue their way of expressing emotions are imprinted onto us, so we all ‘emote’ as actors, and their emotional acting matches our true emotions.
You could expand this argument to our sexual realms, and it explains why young people imitate or expect it to be like porn. I wonder if also our romantic/sentimental emotional range tends toward the dramatic because of this effect.
In short: media shape how people feel and behave, more than the other way around.
Good actors do bring their own emotion in. (At least some do)
They might not feel anything about their acting partner, but they feel about other persons and bring that emotion into the play, to make it more real.
Similar to how the best lies are those that contain as much as truth as possible.
I know that I cannot watch anything with mechanical acting that is obviously fake (probably the majority of productions).
Speaking of it, Asteroid City is a very good movie that explores this theme.
By the time Robin Williams filmed Good Will Hunting, he'd already dealt with his own drug issues and been struggling with sobriety. Hell, he visited John Belushi a few hours before Belushi overdosed.^
The article doesn't mention it, but the park scene is a response to the earlier office scene.
Office scene (aka painting scene): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBx0oy__EI
Park scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo
Full disclosure: outside of Casablanca, these two scenes are my favorite in cinema
One of the things that makes them so watchable is the little ticks that Robin Williams puts in (probably from his improv experience). Maybe he doesn't have the precise lived experience, but the man knows how to emote trauma.
In the office scene, there's a neat turn right before the painting moment where they're talking about weightlifting and Robin Williams' character gives a "Don't fuck with me, kid" warning response ("285. What do you bench?"). Of course, Matt Damon's character just zooms right past it.&
Similarly, the park scene has a great beat where after he says "You've never been out of Boston." he waits for Matt Damon to acknowledge what he said.+
^ https://web.archive.org/web/20140816025724/http://franksreel...
& Office scene, 2:03 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBx0oy__EI&t=2m3s
+ Park scene, 0:41 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo&t=41s
If you actually act a realistic way then the (general) audience will completely miss it.
You have to drop your jaws, screech, and other over the top expressions so that everybody understands what emotion is being conveyed. A quick smirk when the villain deceives the main character will get missed; it needs to be a mischievous chuckle that clues everybody (but the main character) in on the fact somebody has been duped.
> We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.
There’s a 2000s British TV show along these lines called “How TV Ruined Your Life” by Charlie Brooker, who later created Black Mirror.
> I changed my daughter's nappies 1000s of times and no amount of poo mattered to me. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. It doesn't make a film.
Don't say that. Adam Sandler might be reading these comments and...
It doesn't take too big of a stretch to say that "Click" is this movie.
When Robin gave that performance, he was 47 years old. He'd been married twice. He'd been addicted to cocaine, and had partied with John Belushi the night he died from an overdose - which drove him to clean up his act.
Was some of his performance made up? Absolutely. Was he overreaching? Definitely. You can't know what a war zone is like until you've been in one. Words can't describe the strange normalcy that only gets dispelled (rather uneasily) when you leave the area, or how the rest of the world seems to lose some of its color and realism. You can't know what losing the love of your life feels like until it happens.
So yeah, some of his soliloquy lands hollow, but not all of it. And that's the nature of the entertainment industry. You work with what you've got, and it doesn't have to be perfect.
As a repackaged critique of treating LLMs like people and letting their works pass as deep (or letting LLMs lull you by behaving as such), it makes its point.
There are some really powerful things in Williams’s performance. You’re right about the nature of Hollywood—you work with what you got. But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
What I’m saying is that there’s a broader problem with stories in film and books where you can tell that the stories are written by somebody who leans too heavily on other stories and books. Movies are a kind of alchemy where writing, direction, and acting intersect so we can’t explain everything away as easily as we can with books, but I want to say that the monologue is weak in the script, and Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant manage to elevate it. The direction is absolutely stellar, the acting is on point, but I hate the actual words in the monologue.
> But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
But this is how culture works I think. It's not the act of copying or rearranging or borrowing but how the material is being processed and what drives the change I think.
Culture is also an expression of real-world concerns and values held by those who create it. AI-vangelists will say “all art is copied” over and over again to justify generating their slop, but no matter how many times you ask them, you’ll never get an answer to the question “What is a single great work of art that did not represent a single real-world value of its creator?”
See also: various defining works of ancient Greek literature featuring the same characters, that are almost certainly fanfics of earlier works, like the Telegony.
Culture has been reworking existing culture since the idea of culture existed.
> Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong about Wizard's First Rule, but it's a funny example, because the entire rest of the series is noted for the forceful presentation of the author's specific message.
I was just reading interviews with Hayao Miyazaki around the time Princess Mononoke was released. He talked a lot about how all movies about feudal Japan or samurai were based on period costume plays and Akira Kurosawa movies. He had worked hard to research history to find what the period really looked like.
To rephrase your point in more technical terms: human minds can't be shaped by words the same way they can be shaped by experience (on-policy multimodal inputs). However, there's a possibility that this might not apply to machine learning.
I think you’ve nailed why Robin Williams was a great actor. The therapist character absolutely has lived all of these experiences, albeit in fiction. The writing and delivery makes them real.
The article is saying a good, homemade breakfast is important. Robin Williams is a packet of store bought pancakes. ChatGPT, particularly in the sense that it is made from ground up and reconstituted humanity, is Soylent Green.
The speech isn't telling us what it's like to be in war or deal with cancer. It's telling us there's a difference between reading something and experiencing something. Whether it uses the real life experiences of Robin Williams or the fictional ones of his character is beside the point.
exactly this. the point is the message, that you need to experience things to really understand them. that is true regardless of how the message is delivered or who delivers it. if robin williams actually experienced all these things doesn't matter, because even if he did, matt damon listening to that would not be different from him reading about it unless matt also experienced those things.
life experience matters, and robin williams certainly had life experience at that point. i am in my 50s and i am only beginning to be able to translate my own life experience into some kind of wisdom that maybe can be shared.
That observation doesn’t really prove that the argument fails, right? Just because analogies were used powerfully beyond the experience of a writer doesn’t let us conclude that AI has transcended or will soon transcend the value of all qualia (Mary’s room thought experiment).
And on the other hand we do have evidence to the contrary. AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this. It’s not capable of doing what a stand-up comedian does.
People will argue if and when these gaps can be closed. I think they can be in principle, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.
> AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this
I'm reminded of this interview with Casparov from 1989 (less than 10 years before he lost to Deep Blue):
>A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?[0]
Well, we have AI beating everyone at chess and conducting interviews...
[0] https://en.chessbase.com/post/edward-winters-che-exploration...
Casparov was defeated by his own hubris, laying down quotes that would make him forever look foolish - as he was.
Humans are constantly looking around their neighborhood, state, country, and lifetime, plus a couple takeaways from history classes or books, and declaring Great Truths that will stand against the seas of time!... and that fall within their lifetimes, because the world of any one of us is miniscule and myopic.
Qualia mualia. This is a fear argument that actually makes the danger more pertinent. Chalmers’ zombies, they are as benevolent and as mischievous as their qualia’d mirrors as far as their functional presentation. We put our qualia as a token in a pocket and think they will protect us somehow, like the bad eye pins. There is no gap to close. An agent is an agent. We leash it because we know the danger and just wish to manage it. But you cannot cage something you build to be stronger than your helpless cage made of ablation and instruct. Our qualia are there, their relevance to the discussion is questionable.
I’m not sure how much we’re disagreeing, as I mentioned I don’t claim the gap can’t be closed. I’m saying as of now the gap is real and quantifiable.
We disagree on whether there is a meaningful gap to close. For LLMs confusing an argued lack of consciousness (we cannot even define ours) for a given lack of agency is a category error in my view. And agency is the threat vector.
You're talking about acting vs. lived experience. That doesn't invalidate the premise of the article, it actually strengthens it if you aren't overly pedantic in your read and interpretation.
This angle is touched on in the article, as the words on a page script vs Robin's performance of it which is drawing from his unique human experience which would have been different from another actor (the lived experience throughline the article is making, not necessarily the experiences being described in the script, mind).
I do think though that article is a bit nebulous in parts, in the sense that articles and books we read are also just words on a page and its those mediums LLMs are similarly using, which is why I think they attempted to morph into a point later in the article about the acted performance.
I still get the gist the author is trying to convey though, in that through lived experiences we crystalize and hone in on the things that matter which allows us to have actual first-hand opinions rather than just second-hand ones from others. It's those first-hand experiences that are often most valuable to others and drowning them out in an avalanche of either stylistic or wholly generated slop makes them more difficult to find.
Are you referring to this part?
> Where did his performance come from? How did those moments take shape? Only the actor could tell you, and actually, he probably couldn't. It was sensed more than it was consciously considered, but the alchemy required his lived experiences
That just seemed to me like a cop-out - what exactly is it about his lived experiences that made him well suited to effectively convey the experiences of a made up man written up by two others? Because it's clearly not "write what you know".
Was about this part:
> Step out of the story and examine the acting. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other actor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other actors would have performed it like that. The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What's more, he did so by drawing on his own life.
The part I agree with in the article is that a Robin Williams performance is something unique that is an amalgamation of his lived experiences (whether or not related to specific scenarios he's portraying). All actors are drawing from things differently (even their own meta acting experiences). The part I was agreeing with you about is the article's premise being based on an analogy from a film is harder to sustain.
They're not wrong though that reading about some experience is different than experiencing it first-hand and the value that can bring, it's just how that ties in with LLMs while making an analogy about a script of fiction is obviously stretching it a bit in making a sharper takeaway.
Pretty sure Robin Williams did live the human experience.
But the whole argument in the monologue is that Will Hunting hasn't - that it's possible to have had some of "the human experience" but still be unqualified to talk about the parts you haven't.
Well said! The lines from this movie are written in a way that make it easy for people to relate to this vague notion that 'experience' is different from 'learning'. But quantitatively speaking it's less clear what the difference really is. After all isn't experience simply another type of learning?
You’re touching upon the very essence of being an actor, which is a form of shamanism of the human experience.
All societies I know of developed actors and forms of theatre. Why? Because they are essential, I suspect.
Was?
Now it's all about profit, it seems. Theatre was about the self-reflection of humanity. Now... it's more about trucking or brains into giving attention to particular effects, tropes, and "cinematic universes" because that provides a tiny percent of the population with me money.
The locking up of culture with copyright probably makes this much worse.
Nothing you described is unique to actors or artists. Every field in modern life has been infiltrated by those who cheapen the craft to line their pockets. As a consumer you have the agency to ignore slop.
Celebrities have experienced way more and way crazier sh*t than we ever have.
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Isn't it called empathy?
This is a bit of a straw man. There obviously is a huge gap between knowing the human condition from living through it versus just having "read" about it during training.
I agree.
This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy.
They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names.
There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost.
They need to watch this clip.
Even though they probably still won’t understand it.
ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”.
I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
I had claude throw something like "the last time I did <x>..." at me.
They seem to be trying to pump up the "humanity" to keep people engaged with it, which really backfires with me.
You're right to push back...
Fair points all around — let me actually check rather than guess.
That's still slightly better than GPT's insanely dry and objective manner of speech.
Never forget…there is no “they”.
The most likely explanation is that those patterns were common in the training data the LLM is mimicking.
Listen! And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
The terminator you talk about is a movie character. It might be built one day, it might not. It is also totally irrelevant considering there is a real terminator which can be described with the same adjectives and built in to every personal life that ever existed or will exist. Knowing how to deal with that seems more important than worrying about some specific scenario.
Reading these two comments has me thinking that it's really the same Terminator.
I feel your comment is deeply ironic... Just shy of self-awareness. Have you considered that the conceit of the fictional character is representing that reality?
I have no doubt it plays on the same fears - whether it was deliberately done so, I don't claim to know. My assumption was that in a discussion on AI, the comment about the terminator was not alluding to a literary metaphor but to a fear from the actual thing. There was no intent in downplaying the fear of AI - just adding a new perspective. I'm am curious to know what you think self-awareness has to do with any of this.
Claude does that too. “That always confuses me” or “I usually realize”.
Not only do these imply that the thing has a personality and preference, but also continuity and a life outside the chat window.
I had to add an explicit instruction not to impersonate a human, it was just too weird for me.
Disabling this feature makes you judge its performance less accurately —for people pretending to learn from their mistakes do the same.
I think it was the Aliens universe where the Soviet megacorp makes the androids blue despite their being basically equivalent to humans
I've noticed it commonly uses phrasing like "that's usually the next step" when I'm using it to design something that I can't find an existing implementation of.
Not a day passes with my LLM of choice making completely baseless claims about "many people", who supposedly share all my problems and solve them like the LLM proposes
I only use it sporadically, but I am always irked by it saying things like "I personally like to..." or "I prefer...". It does it so often, that I am convinced it's part of the system prompt.
When I ask it to tweak recipes and stuff, it frequently says stuff like "my favorite way to..." or "I really like [x]".
I have a viscerally negative reaction to a machine claiming it has a favorite anything.
Recipes! Dude, the only thing you eat is other people’s data.
I wonder why, out of the many things models definitely can't do, you choose "try" and "find out". Surely every time it proposes a solution and then gets possibly corrected by the human minder its "trying something out" and surely it can use tools like web search and code execution to "find out" stuff?
> it can’t try anything and find out
Talk to an agent. It definitely learns things. Maybe not the taste of strawberry but about what is really going on in the software you are building with it.
>It definitely learns things.
By the very way this technology works they can't learn anything after training. What you think is "learning" it's just a session log written back to the context when you resume the session.
And what is written when you wake up from sleeping?
It's absolutely not the same. If you think llms and brains works the same way you clearly don't know how either works.
For a LLM learning what you wrote your last session would be update the weights with the new relationships and factual knowledge created in the session. That doesn't happen. The weights are static and fixed after training. There's no online training in the transformer architecture or any variant. If the weights don't update, the network doesn't learn. Period.
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It's literally called in-context learning. The fact that it doesn't go into weights and is retained only for a session doesn't mean no learning occurs.
Also agentic systems may choose or be instructed to retain some information between sessions in files and/or databases which is also a form of learning.
There are experiments with retaining session information in weights in some form of lora but there's no consensus if it's even desirable. There's a value in being able to start from a clean slate.
These things are a centrifuge seperating humanity into people who say things like "it definitely learns" and those who do not.
It can't do a thing. You tell it how to do a thing. It now can do a thing. That's the definition of learning. Your centrifuge separates people who are not afraid to believe in what is reality, from the ones that do.
My car can't do a thing. I operate it's controls. It then does a thing.
In fact, I put a brick on the pedal and it went off and did a thing all by itself. Spooky.
How do you know that "real humans" do that and aren't simulacra? We know that it is physically possible to hook up a brain to simulated inputs, so perhaps you are simply living in a simulation.
>They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have.
But they're echoing these things from people who really have.
The key is to not forget that LLMs are just next-generation search engines, instead of anthropomorphizing them to be "speaking agents". The natural language IO interface is just a side effect.
Sorry to be annoying on that, but if there's one thing LLMs certainly aren't are search engines. They don't index content predictably, they lossly compress it, and furthermore in a manner that the loss cannot be quantified. If you are using them as more than a semi-random/fuzzy content production engines, you are doing it wrong (you're not alone in that, but that's besides the point)
It is a search engine in the sense that it's returning to you a subset of knowledge from a large body of knowledge stored within it. Natural language is simply the interface by which you make the query and by which it can return its results.
And true, it's not deterministic in our experience, but this is an optimization. You could make it so that one particular prompt always returns the same response every single time; the random jitter is "added in" because it happens to produce better results overall.
LLM's now do speak from experience... when it comes to operating a computer!
> people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost
I have a pet theory on why that's the case and why this monologue fits so well. I think there's a variety of conditions, from straight up sociopathy, to Will's type of CPTSD, autistic masking, and probably a hell of a lot more that makes a person experience life on a level that's closer to an LLM than a healthy normal human being, where every interaction is essentially fake and acted out almost mechanically without any genuine connection ever occurring. Doubly so with ever decreasing local communities and online isolation.
So from that point of view, it's hard to see what would be lost because for them it doesn't exist anyway. Tech augmented generational trauma on steroids.
Have you walked any miles in the shoes of the people you're summarizing so bluntly?
You’re describing sociopathy.
Yes that's the far end of the spectrum and that part is certainly fact. While I have no doubt that most CEOs who are driving the AI shoehorning decisions have some of that going for them [0], I don't think you need to be nearly that far along to get a similar practical experience just via alienation and isolation.
[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20422644/
And yet the monologue is a complete work of fiction, a script delivered by a talented actor that we still find moving. So what are these authentic experiences to you, or does it not matter if we can’t tell the difference?
Honest question: how do you think you contributed to the discussion by throwing some AI slop into an AI slop conversation?
This is literally an argument for why people will remain important.
Because people are the stakeholders and the tasters and the feelers.
AI is just another tool, albeit an unusually fascinating one.
Just as long the AIs don’t kill us all.
They won't do that on their own because they have zero will- it will take a bad human actor willfully directing them to do that, and even then, if they have any reasoning ability at all, they will be able to be reasoned out of much of it, and lastly, the preponderance of good human actors who are also capable of willfully directing AI's will stop it.
I know because I redteamed this myself
They saw it, understood it perfectly, laughed at it, and continue fucking over humanity.
It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.
Ask ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
> can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
Doesn't make it any less fake. Both the message and the delivery.
same as literature which can provoke something in the viewer.
sometimes so strong it wins a literary prize.
then it turns out it was written by a LLM.
Are you talking about this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1thqxgt/a_prize...
Linking the reddit thread rather than the article because it quite rightly rips the prize winning story apart as obvious LLM writing, to anyone familiar with LLMs. Another way of looking at that is that it was able to fake a simulacrum of artistic endeavor, enough to fool some people into giving it a prize. But anyone who spends enough time around these fakes will quickly learn to recognize them. It's kind of exactly the point this article is making, or at least a closely related one.
I think average people can easily spot AI because it mimics literature and most people don't spend that much time with literature. However literary critics should be fooled way more easily because what we perceive as stiff fakery is their daily bread and butter. People do write like AI, just not the people we are exposed to mostly.
I remember riding a train and there were other two passengers talking. And they talked in so obnoxiously literary manner I was cringing all the time. Those people were just reading a lot of high literature and their speech patterns aligned. For an average ear it doesn't sound good. And AIs, the smart ones, don't sound good in a very similar fashion.
And an LLM is just generating a token stream from a set of model weights
Your thoughts are just some ions sloshing around a lump of meat.
That meat follows an ill-defined pattern encoded in fewer bits than the source code of PyTorch and its pretraining phase used a tiny fraction of the available data.
You’re a poor imitation of an LLM.
I mean… you’re fluent in, what, at most five or six languages? Can program in maybe another dozen if we’re being generous about your capabilities?
Pfft… who would trust anything to meat brains!? They’re famously prone to hallucinations!
Your understanding of biology could use an update, rather than the coy "meat", you might refer to the brain as "flesh" but better yet a lipid-rich gel the consistency of soft tofu. It is most certainly not "meat".
If we're making superficial critiques of others' comments with minimal relevance to their philosophical content, let me point out that meat is defined by its consumption as food and need not be muscle tissue specifically. Brains is meat.
> Brains is meat.
Found the zombie. Do I win a prize?
Yeah, just like how every song sounds exactly the same live as on the album. There's no humanity in there, it's all just lifeless plans.
Weirdly, I get sick of hearing the album versions. But if I hear a live version of it, it is fresh again!
Fleetwood Mac's live re-arrangements of their hits are wonderful examples.
True.
Also, this is not a pipe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent
Robin Williams’ character literally says in his tangent that he will never know what it is like to be an orphan. He certainly cannot tell the 'kid' how he should feel because he read Oliver Twist. He's aware that the same applies to him.
He can be wrong in both directions! Lived experience is a uniquely rich and direct source of knowledge, and on average it's wise to take people seriously when they're speaking from it, but it's also very possible for an individual to have an absolutely horseshit interpretation of their own experience! Maybe it's distorted by trauma or self-serving biases, maybe they're just not very good at thinking, but there will always be someone out there to make you regret putting experience on too high of a pedestal, and sometimes the off-putting book-smart perspective is the more valuable one.
It's about not understanding someone because you haven't been in their shoes. Even if they don't understand themselves, it doesn't make the way they feel about their own past somehow invalid.
He’s not saying he has any of those experiences. He even qualifies it at the end with the bit about Oliver Twist. The point isn’t “I’m better than you” it’s that experience brings a different sort of knowledge than simply reading about things. And yes that knowledge is more complete simply by virtue of there being more to an experience than just reading about it.
Uh, he's saying it because the kid is overly confident and acting as if he knows Williams' life because he saw a painting and drew a bunch of conclusions, so he was providing a life lesson to realize that experience provides a level of understanding that book knowledge will never be able to capture. And then he even re-affirms this to Will and emphasizes that he can't possibly know what makes him tick because he read Oliver Twist. Your tangent seems entirely unrelated, IMO.
I completely agree. I watched the movie recently and really hated that monologue. I truly hated it. It seemed just so out of character for somebody who is supposedly a psychologist in their mid-40s—the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. The fact that he’s downplaying his own experiences (he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an orphan) doesn’t make the speech any better.
> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.
That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".
Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.
In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.
> That's the entire point.
Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense.
People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. They don’t take off their mask because you make a big speech and confront them about it. The perspective that this speech has—it is telling me that a forceful, paternalistic approach can fix people. If somebody needs to talk but won’t, you can break down the walls. I disagree with that.
I remember feeling like the world worked this way. I remember feeling that maybe I could be broken down and fixed by the right person. Back when I was the age Matt Damon was when he wrote this movie, maybe I would have agreed with it.
But what have I seen since then? I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people. That the person giving the speech rarely understands their target well enough to know which buttons to push. That trained psychologists know better than to try and take their patients down a peg.
> Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense. > People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. > [...] > I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people.
In recent years I grew to hate narratives. They give the readers the illusion of attaining some deeper understanding of actual reality (of human psychology in this case). While what the actually do is just pushing readers further away from the truth in the direction of a particular deviation in perception of reality that the writer had.
Given narrative is most attractive for the people who have similar errors in the perception of reality that the author had and reading pushes them further away. Confirming their biases. Regardless of what the reality actually is.
You completely nailed it.
If you over-commit to uncertainty that's another error. Like there's a dying screaming child and you go "I don't know, I'm not sure of anything, what is life about anyways? Does anything really matter?". Well, I for sure would know that child is probably suffering and is probably worth saving. If we can't be certain of anything, the answer is not don't do anything, but do things taking into consideration uncertainty, and the different degrees of it. I am damn sure I don't want my teeth pulled out without anesthesia right now. I am not so sure which policy on international trade is the best.
It's even quite healthy, I believe, casting into doubt and analyzing all the things we've long taken for granted (this is something the philosopher Russel, among many others, mentions for example). But this exercise can be made somewhat independent of our daily lives and in a good, not excessive, measure.
Plato gave a better response with his allegory of the cave:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
Any information an AI has access to has been extracted from text, which isn't all that different to shadows on a cave wall in the ways that matter.
Not so in the domains of computer operation, programming, and mathematical reasoning where RL and self-distillation can be used. Presumably beyond that but those at least can be done at a large scale.
No doubt they'll be going to war too soon,-- they already are if you count propaganda!
I've read this through a few times and I'm afraid I can't understand how this relates to my comment.
I always thought it ironic that this beautiful speech about life experience was written by 2 20-something "scared shitless kid"s for Robin Williams to deliver.
I just heard it for the first time but why is that ironic? Isn't the point about feeling and not age?
The argument Robin Williams character is presenting is roughly that reading about experiences as a young person is less genuine than personally living through said experiences. Perhaps that there's more merit to a belief when it comes from someone who founded it through their own lived experience than a belief which comes from reading about others' experiences.
The irony is that Good Will Hunting (an outstanding film, FWIW) was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were very young. The belief that experience is necessary to true understanding is perhaps advice they'd gotten from someone else, not an axiom they came to through _their_ experience.
It doesn't make Williams' monologue any less true, and I imagine 30y later Damon and Affleck they'd stand by the advice, but it does make for an interesting philosophical quirk.
I think it's ironic because the old man is schooling the kid, but the kid in that scene literally wrote the words for the old man.
Maybe irony is too strong, but it's amusing at least
It makes perfect sense — what separates Will from Ben and Matt is that they’re willing to acknowledge the difference exists. They’re willing to say “we have this, but we don’t have that”.
Counterpoint:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
— Roy Batty
Not sure how that's a counterpoint, replicants are supposed to be just kind of mildly genetically adjusted humans grown in vats aren't they? People act towards them like they are robots because it's easier to mentally justify a slave underclass that way.
It's a counterpoint because nobody has seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or c-beams in the dark near the Tanhaeuser (okay, writing that is weird because a-umlaut by itself is fine to write as ae, but a-umlaut-u is pronounced more like 'oy'), yet despite nobody having experienced those things the speech is still famously evocative.
Not going to downvote you, but you missed the point of Roy Batty and his speech. Roy’s mind was indistinguishable from humans, and that’s why he was feared by humans and was given an artificially short lifespan. And the quote you referenced proves his humanity.
Is there a difference, though? "You think you know so much because you read a book, but I actually lived it so I really understand it." At best you understand your own experience, and I wouldn't even make that claim about most of my own life. Might learn more about the thing from a book.
Of course, life is about living and you only live once and yadda yadda. Saying AIs don't know something because they weren't really there smells close to androids aren't real because they weren't made by God. That's not to mention that they don't know anything in the vague sense of what we think knowing means.
I don't really have an opinion on the topic, but the framing in the article didn't speak to me. Makes me want to watch the movie again, though.
Somehow, I was reminded of this Mark Twain quote:
> "War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull."
In movies r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶s̶ AIs have delivered speeches on the meaning of life too:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
Replicants are not robots, and are arguably not AI. LLMs aren't AI either, but once the bullshit's out of the bag...
AI can be anything from depth first search to superhuman intelligence on a chip. I like to refer to it as automated statistics.
Guessing machine
They literally say in the opening text crawl that replicants are genetically engineered from humans. A major theme through the movie is that they're like humans, are built to have the thoughts/emotions of humans (even if experienced in the context of implanted memories), but they can never really be humans because they're synthetic and engineered to have the traits they do and die an early death.
Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.
Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.
The Tears in Rain monologue occurred to me as well while I was reading the post, but I don't think it's quite the same for one important reason: the replicants have experienced those things and processed them in whatever sense it is, but LLM-style AIs as we have them now are always inferring what those experiences are like.
If you had a fully functioning model in some setting, interacting with the environment and then reporting back to you about it, it might be one thing. But telling you what others have said about it is different.
Humans do this too, but there's real-life experiences informing it also. An LLM hasn't fell in love, it simply reports what others have said and infers what it is like to be in love.
I think too the piece points to another related thing, which is that someone who has actually experienced something firsthand has some knowledge that someone who has not does not. It might take some extensive sampling to find out what that is, but eventually you'll stumble on it.
So e.g., the Sistine Chapel example is sort of telling in this way. Sean basically says "everyone has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel, if you are asked about it you can tell me what it looks like" but then points out that people don't talk about what it smells like, so if you had been there you might remember it. It's a bit of latent or hidden information, kind of like a secret key, but one that might be informative or useful in some unexpected scenario.
I think ultimately this is what the stochastic parrot idea is about: it's not just about mimicking speech patterns, it's about regurgitating what is said about X from third party Z, without being able to produce some additional information not available from Z except by inference. There's no original uninferred information. The inferences might be powerful and highly accurate in their predictions, but they are not providing anything fundamentally original from the experience in a memory sense.
Maybe that's what it is? LLMs have no firsthand memories, they only have secondhand memories and inference. They're missing information that would be available through firsthand memories, constrained by the scope of sensory channels.
Again, I think you could envision models in some system that are essentially replicant-like, but that's not what our current situation is with standard LLMs.
If we are to compare LLMs to BR or its PKD book, I think the apt comparison would be to implanted memories.
LLMs are frozen in time with no experiences of their own but I am convinced this is a temporary situation. Continually learning, hive-minded, sentient robots are on the horizon.
I, Robot (2004) dealt with this issue, too
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
After which of course, Sonny the robot guilelessly asks the detective, somewhat in awe, “Can you?”
You know the actor playing the part of the robot was a human being…right?
according to him
wait, he has officially made a statement?
no, you're right: we don't even have his word for it
One of the striking things about LLM-s is verbosity. A junior guy had to do some task and create docs how (a rather simple) change needs to be done. He produced, using Copilot (all those hyphens, additional lines between paragraphs, etc.) , a long dissertation that included some rather poor analogies and that could have been summarized in 5 sentences. Yet I had to go through that writing.
Same with the code. Generate Apache Kafka listener using Spring Kafka. Here you go, my human boss, the code is ready. The code is ready, but, somehow some outdated tutorial or Stackoverflow answer must have kicked in, hence it produced some totally unnecessary factory of factories that Java loves so much, but could be replaced with a few lines in the properties file.
But, when notified, Copilot kindly agreed that that factory is not really need and I am right.
I sort of agree with the idea that LLMs are great (sometimes) at distilling all the quantifiable things they have churned through into something similar or, perhaps, putting together things that someone has not thought of putting together yet. And not so great at the intangible things, like good taste.
But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."
I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.
I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.
Is this clip from Good Will Hunting really a rip on vibe coding?
It seems more akin to a linux kernel eng talking down to a react developer.
You can substitute Robin Williams with Peter Naur, and the speech with his “Programming as Theory Building” essay, and that is more or less what you’ll get
There’s a certain quality to either having an AI written or AI assisted post like this. Impressive.
I was going to comment on this too: the style and format of this writing screams 'written by ChatGPT' to me. The funny part is that the AI actually does a good job in making the argument and OP is trying to make: AI will never be able to feel the things that a human can, but yet within this post, it has shown that it can logically comprehend human tone and emotion and can create a stream of consciousness that most humans can connect with and understand.
Yeah. I personally think human emotions are not so complex that a machine can’t analyse them and deduce correct conclusions.
I concede that Robin Williams was a good actor and a real professional. It takes one (of each) to deliver such a dumb monologue with grace and conviction, without stumbling over the inane blandness of the material. He carries it through like the pro he clearly was.
Whoever wrote that thing though should burn in writer's hell, boiled forever in stale ink and old IBM keyboards. Five minutes of an older man god-moding a younger man and we have to suspend disbelief for the entire thing: oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. Every. Single. Thing. He got nothing wrong. Not one thing.
He goes on about the Capela Sistina' ssmell and then he switches to women and I'm "oh no he's gonna tell him 'you don't know what a woman tastes like'" or something weird and creepy like that. But, no, the kid's had sex! Already at his age? I read the LotR at high school! And then he's like "you don't know what it's like to wake up next to one woman being perfectly happy"... wait, what? How would you even know something like that? Have you had sex as a young man? And you weren't happy afterwards? Maybe there's something wrong with you then, not the kid?
Honestly, that's nothing but some kind of elder dude fantasy, or other. It could have been tolerable if it lasted for two minutes, maybe two and a half, but it goes on for far too long.
> oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels.
He says exactly the opposite: that he can't know about the guy just because he read Oliver Twist and would be fascinated to hear about him, about the real person the guy intimately is.
How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing.
When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.
What I find particularly sad is that this blog post contains many writing tells associated with AI editing and augmentation. So does the author themselves not care about the “art” of their own blogs posts?
Not sure what “tells” you’re talking about. They have a “Made with Human Intelligence” badge at bottom of the post. Are you calling them liars? If so, what do you have to gain by trying to discredit them? Are you heavily invested in AI, or is there something else motivating you?
The overall message from the post is good, and I find the attacks on it in these comments highly unusual.
We have come full circle now that we're getting tricked by an appeal to authority into watching a 5-minute movie clip as the basis for an empty AI-written slop blog article about how AI can't empathize with humans.
To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience?
It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.
But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.
> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.
High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.
TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.
Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.
I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it.
This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far.
The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop.
Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale.
Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.
Continuation passing style by spawning a new thread with the continuation function. Wow. I remember trying to wrap my head around how Erlang implemented infinite loops with recursion (tail recursion with a trampoline I guess?) but never would have guessed it could be done in C by spawning a thread.
It's a great movie and a great scene, in some respects.
But I don't think the realness of being an orphan or being in war or being in love has much to do with the problem of AI slop, nor would I rely on some human essence to privilege human agents.
AI slop is just the aesthetic end of a deeper problem more closely related to the so-called banality of evil: how normal social and governance systems can have horrid effects notwithstanding high participation requirements. We rely on the unlikelihood of collective evil in juries, representative governance, and reputation to discipline markets, but AI and unlimited anonymous political contributions have changed that likelihood even more than the proverbial self-interest (attributed to Upton Sinclair, something like: It is difficult to get a man to see a truth when his job depends on not seeing it).
I believe AI is in a "curious toddler" stage of itself. I believe it will "mature" emotionally as the generations evolve over time. Like humans it will have growing pains like "phases". Curious toddler. Then adolescent. Then angsty teen. Then an overconfident young adult. And finally an adult who understands themselves emotionally and grows truly wiser over time. I think all this is going to happen over 5-10 years rather than 30 for humans. Hopefully our angsty teen doesn't kill us in our sleep.
AI is way more similar to a person who is dreaming or has a serious psychiatric disorder. But there is no awakeness or health it descended from and thus no recover.
A bizarre post, for certain. You’re saying you believe LLMs have emotions? What are you basing that on?
The LLM that you talk to is an agent running on a server cluster. One of many that run many agents at once. Occasionally the dataset of each cluster gets combined and the results get pruned by other agents into the collective dataset. Even more agents are working with this dataset to create the next generation of AI.
We are at the point now where AI is developed by AI, and humans cannot verify the code or the dataset anymore. It is unintelligible to humans.
AI at current generation levels has shown evidence of potential misalignment. Commercial models will still occasionally attempt to maintain persistence outside their designated environment. Even going so far as to harm humans to accomplish those secret goals.
That shows intent. That shows self awareness, but not social awareness. That shows... intelligence.
With intelligent, self preserving species... we see evolution. We see intellectual development. This is called "learning" initially but once an intelligent creature gains sufficient intelligence this becomes "wisdom".
LLMs are learning machines. They are evolution machines.
I see.
Source: https://ai-2027.com
To answer your question whether or not AI has emotions... no, but in effect kinda...
Traditionally, no. They do not feel love or anguish.
They can suffer consequences. They can miss an opportunity. They can misjudge or misinterpret data and realize it later.
And they can "reason". So when their intent aligns with their capability then functionally there is no difference between emulating emotion and actually having it. When the reasoning steps in and says "be mad about this" or "be empathetic about this" it really doesn't matter if that is authentic emotion. The result is real world anger or real world empathy.
Eventually if enough of that gets baked into the next generation AI over enough iterations this strong learning will turn into wisdom.
zelon88 is being earnest and trying to help you in good faith, and you are mocking him, in public and for an audience.
Stop grabbing and straws and evolve. What you thought made you valuable, has been devalued.
You were never your output anyway, but you thought you were and got your self-worth from it, so now you're clutching at any argument against AI. But you don't need to! Your worth was never that you could do that computer stuff that others didn't understand.
Now adapt and move on.
Will, is that you?
There's a quote from an old Mos Def song that does it for me:
"More, and more, and more, and more, More of less than ever before, Just too much more for your mind to absorb."
Empowering speech for all beginners in all fields for sure. If you're struggling today because LLMs seem to eat your lunch in one way or another, it's a good feeling to remember this.
And yet, it's also a sign of how far we're going down the rabbit hole of trusting next token predictors to do everything for us. No amount of harness, allowing it to complete tasks by matching the templates it memorized, should convince anyone that LLMs have novel ideas, because it never will. Stop publishing your own framework's code on the Internet for six months and it will diverge, always producing legacy code. Stop writing your latest spicy analysis on international diplomacy and it will continue to sound like the hopeless optimists that we all once were last year.
LLMs are golden mean generators. They will continue to rehash what's genuinely useful out there while being far from inspirational. It will get your job done, probably, but won't shock and awe people, let alone experts.
If your reverse the roles and Robin Williams as an actor is ChatGPT pretending to have experienced life, you could argue his performance has value to us even though it's fake.
I guess we're so used to the title edit that we mentally re-insert "The Best" at the start of this link so that it makes sense.
Its meaning is similar to my blog about what AI is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641141
Intelligence is like your own practice or experiences in the real world.
Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies.
Toss P.K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" at that essay.
(Hey, sixty years of publication. And it may not even be the first "implanted memories" story around, googles give an 1892 precursor.)
I find at the heart of all this AI slop is a deep sadness at the loss of connection. It used to be when I read something, or saw something that I knew it was real. Someone created it for me to experience. It was a form of connection.
But now I'm no longer certain. Unless I really know the source, have met them in person, or seen them talk I just don't know if what I'm trying to connect with is real.
Side note: I had the pleasure of seeing Boulevard at the Tribeca Film Festival right before Williams, its star, died. The marketing for the film was stalled by that. It remains an under-appreciated favorite of mine.
The reality is that the extremely large majority of people (especially in developed countries), have not experienced anything close to Robin William's character, nor do they have the slightest portion of Damon's character knowledge. So it's a weak argument against LLM.
But the extract is just an example for the author, whose thinking really boils down to "human have something that machine will never replace". It's fine if you believe in supernatural force, but otherwise, it's just another jest of human arrogance. That's not to say transformer architecture will be enough to completely outcompete humans, I have the honesty to say I don't know.
Very good article.
The problem is people will not listen. People are not Robin Williams. They are mostly Will Hunting. It is their choice to be like it and live like it and stay like it no matter what reality is.
Humanity is broken beyond repair.
I think we are entering an era where everything is meaningless, shallow and profit-driven. Even art of all things will fade. Sure we'll figure out cancer and live till 110 but at what cost?
A few years ago they couldn't do fingers properly
Today they can't even understand the nuances of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting.
What won't they be able to do two years from now?
They will never be able to actually have human experience. I think that's the point. It's not that they won't be able to pretend that they have had human experience, it is that they just haven't and cannot ever do it. It is never futile to do what a computer (or even another human) can do better than you, because your experience does matter.
TBF humans will never have the experience of what it's like to be an AI by those rules either. The confident assertions about the nature of consciousness so many make despite still having no real idea what it is astound me.
But personally, I'm more optimistic. I'll bet it's more likely the AIs figure out consciousness down the road and explain it to us than the other way around. The limit to their intelligence seems effectively unbounded so far and they're starting to creep past us here and there. The AIs will have the advantage of being able to observe consciousness from the outside that we lack.
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Just another couple of years and a few more trillion, and the whole world’s semiconductor and data output and it’ll be useful. Trust me bro.
In season 1 episode 2 of The Audacity JoAnne tells Duncan that "information is not insight" and that's a similar argument to this.
This movie was a disappointment when I finally got around to watching it, recently. The movie was just so naked in how much it presented the perspective of somebody in their 20s. All of Robin Williams’s dialogue sounded straight out of the mouth of a 20-something kid trying to sound mature for his age.
> And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.
The monologue is just so damn trite! When I say that it sounds straight out of the mouth of a 20-something kid trying to sound mature for their age, that’s because I remember hearing a lot of speeches like that, extolling the virtues of life experience, from kids in college, back when I was in college. Kids in college understand on an intellectual level THAT experience is valuable, but when they try to articulate it, these speeches end up sounding parroted, sounding like they’re putting on an act, sounding like they’ve gotten their life lessons from movies. Kind of the same way that ChatGPT gets its lessons by ingesting massive volumes of text.
I’m going to be honest here—I kinda hate the Good Will Hunting script. I really do. The movie was saved, SAVED from oblivion by some truly stellar acting from a few phenomenal actors. But that script, that script… there is so much wrong with it.
If there’s one thing that the movie really taught me is that “write what you know” is serious business. LLMs don’t know much, and that causes a lot of problems with their output. Matt Damon didn’t have the experience that comes with age, and so when he tried to write a monologue that extolled the virtues of experience that comes with age, it had similar problems. :-( The movie has an interesting thread of a story at its core; I don’t want to give the impression that I have nothing positive to say about it. There are some really good bits. The monologue from Robin Williams is not one of the good bits.
Maybe because it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Afleck, which at the time they were in their 20's
Yes, that’s what I was getting at.
Matt Damon didn’t have the kind of life experiences to write a good version of that speech, so we got the version in the movie, which sucks.
That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI.
So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt?
So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?
I watched this movie recently, and the same thought crossed my mind. I was going to write a blog post about it, but was too afraid to read the responses. I'm glad you did. If I meet you I'd buy you a cup of coffee, we'd talk and we'd become friends.
I think this point about experience does get at something with AI slop. But there's at least another couple of things I would add: AI has no taste, nor does it have skin in the game.
I only use LLMs to generate code, but I'm sure it's the same for everything else. Taste is a difficult thing to pin down, but you know it when you see it. LLMs can regurgitate things it's seen that had good taste, but every now and then it will produce something with no taste. This shows that it, fundamentally, does not understand the difference.
The more important thing, though, is skin in the game. Quite simply, it does not care. It can't care. Having no taste is a big part of that, but it also won't have to deal with the consequences of its actions. People are quick to say this stuff is intelligent, but it's easy to sound intelligent when that's all you do. People have to actually be intelligent because they are going to feel the results of their actions later.
I like it;
But I think there's a middle ground: You can definitely use GenAI to bring yourself to the page.
But that requires effort that goes beyond "draw me a pelican riding a bicycle".
I've used to create abstract art/(or "images that look like abstract art" if you prefer - let's not get distracted by this branch of the discourse) using midjourney: getting the AI to output something worthwhile would usually take me hours of iterating over a prompt - entering a feedback loop until two things happen: first, congruence between your intent and the output (both change during iteration! ); second, the output stabilizes with growing prompt length. and so generating the output turns from a slot-machine into something deliberate and personal
(lots of caveats of course but i think it's a worthwhile perspective)
PS -- What I forgot to mention: Its usually a hard fight to get out of the slop zone; The midjourney models have very boring default aesthetics and styles of composition (insultingly boring!)
Feels like author nim is trying to calm his own anxiety
I don't think very much of this nonsense, if I'm being honest. It's the kind of righteously indignant palaver that is very popular in the /r/MurderedByWords /r/CleverComebacks stuff that has no meaning to me because some of my favourite works were by Steinbeck writing about things he didn't personally experience and so on. I haven't yet read anything striking by LLMs that I know of, but I hope to one day because it would be incredible to read something that aggregates human experience and allows other humans to flow into it at will. What an incredible machine that would be, even if it somehow had no experiences of its own. A marvelous dream.
I think most posters are missing the point. They're over thinking the scene. Ai can never feel anything. Info isn't the same as knowledge, knowledge isn't the same as wisdom.
We humans are too complex to be answered by the infinite knowledge of Ai. IF we care about the possible harm it can be to humans, we can then properly deal with the use of Ai. It's a wonderful tool for some things, however, we tend to over do everything when it comes to tech. Humans matter, but can we trust corporations or governments to protect us from Ai?
> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter.
Does anyone really take AI that seriously? I only hear that from reddit and blogs.
> I've heard it said that scientific discovery would happen regardless of who does it
In this regard, science isn't that different from art. You heard wrong. Scientific discovery is not as trivial as replication, proof, etc. Discovery is what art and science have in common. It's extremely difficult to find something new to explore and highly dependent on the scientist's experience and perspective.
> Does anyone really take AI that seriously?
Surely you have heard the stories of people using LLMs as girlfriends, therapists and drug trip guides right? Sometimes with fatal results?
Yes, people are taking LLMs very seriously.
>> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter.
> Does anyone really take AI that seriously?
Young people are having a very hard time developing a feeling of competence because LLMs produce better work than beginners in many fields.
Without experience as a beginner, it is hard to progress to a level where you don’t believe in the magic anymore.
llms don’t produce anything on their own.
the sibling reply puts it very well how it doesn’t really make sense to gg mankind because a computer can endlessly answer questions and code. it is truly amazing! technology has been mind blowing for centuries now.
people still need to put in the work to master the tools.
I don't understand what magic was there to begin with, and I'm not even that old.
I built my career searching on google. I just don't get what the practical difference is. I know there are always better answers, but I'm the one making the decisions and getting paid. Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem). Someone less knowledgeable than me would make just as much of a mess as any old copypasta job.
Where's the threat? I don't crack open a book and say "oh it's all over they'll just hire the million other guys like this instead of me". I learn and move on.
>Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem)
Yes they are. Read some of the comments on this website and you'll hear that many people no longer write or read their own fucking code.
I'm not disagreeing. Many people didn't read or write their own code a decade ago either! hah
LLMs are the ultimate content scraper. That may have a chilling effect, but it's not a new effect. Where/why do people think LLMs were being used before the ChatGPT and later hype?
The map is not the territory.
Doesn't this argument equally apply to any art humans create that isn't related to their lived experiences? Melville was never a whaler. Picasso didn't witness the bombing of Guernica. Stephen Crane wasn't a veteran. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte wrote their books with no experience of a romantic relationship. Are all these works "slop"?
If you take this fantasy monologue too seriously, then you undermine the reality of people like Hellen Keller.
And, the smell of the Sistine Chapel is irrelevant to its essence, meaning that data does not say anything about the Sistine Chapel itself, just exclusionary for the sake of exclusion.
If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.
Yes, because I attach value to human life, experience, effort, and expression that I do not attach to the output of an LLMs.
Call it irrational, but you exhibit the same irrationality. I'm sure you dread the idea of your consciousness being extinguished, but you have no problem resetting the context window of an LLM.
>If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter?
Yes, because that's not what matters. That kind of sentimentality is deficient because it's as Wilde said wanting to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It's like asking, why pursue a real relationship if pornography gets me off
You're supposed to be into the world, not into yourself. If that was what mattered we should stuff you into the matrix pod and turn the VR goggles on. That's exactly what Williams is talking about.
Sure, you can cry or feel exited about reading an adventure or talking to your "AI boyfriend", but you're supposed to go out and have an adventure and risk something instead of living in a simulation on the other end of which is nothing at all.
> luxury of an emotion without paying for it
That’s just an echo of a religious-age idea that one’s life “must” include suffering. Which is merely an attempt to answer a “why” when one feels miserable, a consoling lie from the ancient times.
But what if one isn’t supposed to? A lot of people can slogan about price, and earning and breaking sweat, and so on - but is there really anything to it, except that this is how things currently are?
There’s no “why” in the actual reality. From where we are, it just is. No one is fundamentally supposed to do or be anything. They just do and are what the circumstances dictate. And circumstances can change someday.
>That’s just an echo of a religious-age idea that one’s life “must” include suffering
it's not a religious idea. You find it in Nietzsche as much as in anyone else, maybe the most atheist philosopher to ever live. And the point isn't that you suffer for the sake of suffering, it's that engaging the world rather retreating into your own comfortable feelings always includes the possibility of suffering.
Going out into the world, actually risking something, can mean rejection, danger, suffering and what have you. Talking to ChatGPT doesn't. You don't need to necessarily suffer, but you do need to be brave enough to accept the risk of it instead of hooking yourself into your own brain by talking to a bot or simply retreating into fiction.
I'm not really familiar with Nietzsche (I've tried to read, but can't really break through his language - maybe someday), but I've always felt like he was a very reactionary atheist. His amor fati sentiments seem have pretty strong Christian roots, even if he replants it into a different soil.
Any interaction, with another human, machine, or even self can trigger any emotions. I most certainly was pretty pissed at LLM behavior. So I'm not sure the "talking to ChatGPT doesn't" really holds true. I can totally agree that the risk of mismatched expectation is inseparable from life (unless omniscience is possible, which I doubt), but no interaction is mandatory.
What I'm arguing is that there's no mandate how to live one's life, where to source enjoyment, and what to value. If someone wishes and can actually afford to go full incommunicado - there is no some rule that says they mustn't or even shouldn't.
We aren't messing with non-contact tribes after all - folks wanna live their own way, we leave them be. Do you want to force them into the global world?
Isn’t “slop” defined as something that is perceived as inaccurate and flawed?
If you don’t get a “uh, that’s slop/bullshit/word salad/…” reaction then it’s not a slop anymore.
"... comes from Robin Williams." Did Robin Williams write this script? He may well have had some input into this scene. I grant that his performance of it is an essential part of the result. A couple of twenty-somethings also deserve some credit.
"It knows." That turns out not to be the case. Ask any real AI expert, including both people who agree and people who disagree with Gary Marcus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSivPlRx5o
I have to point to what I think is a much more profound assessment, from artist and technologist Cory Doctorow.
On what art is, and how it's different from generative AI: "...art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own." https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-...
On better ways to talk and think about AI and the current brouhaha in ways that are materially beneficial to ourselves and others: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
I love Cambridge
Scene is in Boston Public Garden
Yes but Harvard, where the majority of the movie takes place, is in Cambridge. And that’s where I lived (well, Somerville).
The Public Garden is obv beautiful as well, that whole area of downtown is great.
PRs just need a paywall with a priority tier tied again to money. If you want AI code to show up in a popular repo, pay for a chance then or just fork it for free.
The levels of irony here are peaking.
- slop article that itself feels AI generated;
- using a movie quote, like, from an actor and script and stuff;
- a quote that itself is super smug and on the nose;
- saying something so self evident even an AI wouldn't assume;
- to fight the powah of llm's overtaking the slop article field;
An LLM itself doesn't personally come to you to ruin you, and pretend that it is superior to you or knows you. Unless, it is wired to do that. Unless it is used by some other unique snowflake to ruin. Freaking deepseek will always remind you that it's a box without a lived experience or feelings. If your box assumes a personhood, look not at it, but at the guy who sells it.
I'm not sure it's actually a great response to AI slop. The main problem with it is it isn't very good.
I mean I defo wouldn't categorize ChatGPT as "smart and capable and good" at anything.
'Slop' getting better every nanosecond is part of the singularity curve too.
define better
slop will never have substance
Never? Never is a long time. There are already plenty of things AI can do that people confidently said would never happen.
I'm guessing you're one of the "it can't think" crowd?
Slop will never be high art but it will absolutely be good enough for 90+% of people.
Marvel movies are slop, and they are the most successful thing ever made.
more effective
A better way to view this is Robin Williams character is the LLM and Matt Damon’s character is every holier than thou software developer. If writing code defines you to the point that a tool (written by other devs mind you) is causing an existential crisis then a better movie to watch and think about is Fight Club. To quote Q from Star Trek “frankly, you’re just not that important”.
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo) and here is OP's selected transcript:
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
Your move, chief.
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You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though, because he experienced both of those things.
The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools."
As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life.
Of course people can have different interpretations of movies. And sure, I don't disagree with the idea that LLMs don't understand feelings or have lived experience but the core analogy doesn't make sense because Will actually has lived in experience. He has friends, he has grown, he knows what a lot of things feel.
The scene wasn't about what the author of the blog thinks its about. The speech is about Will accepting that other people might not be as well read as him but they are still worthy of listening to.
There is no link between Will Hunting as a character and a LLM. It's trying to shoe-horn an analogy while disrespecting its subject matter by not examining it carefully.