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The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

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Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#51

Post by klodolph »

randallsquared wrote: post #33

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 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.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#52

Post by klodolph »

yohannparis wrote: post #41
klodolph wrote: post #40

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…

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.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#53

Post by MathMonkeyMan »

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.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#54

Post by Springtime »

falcor84 wrote: post #46

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…

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.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#55

Post by kgwxd »

jimbokun wrote: post #8

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 wi…

They saw it, understood it perfectly, laughed at it, and continue fucking over humanity.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#56

Post by zelon88 »

IAmGraydon wrote: post #48
zelon88 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#57

Post by munificent »

klodolph wrote: post #51
randallsquared wrote: post #33

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 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.

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#58

Post by jiggawatts »

mingus88 wrote: post #13
SoftTalker wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.

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!

Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams

#59

Post by kgwxd »

SoftTalker wrote: post #11
jimbokun wrote: post #8

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 wi…

It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.

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.
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