81–90 of 242 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fleetwood Mac's live re-arrangements of their hits are wonderful examples.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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… wh…
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 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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
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 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…
Because people are the stakeholders and the tasters and the feelers.
AI is just another tool, albeit an unusually fascinating one.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Found the zombie. Do I win a prize?
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…
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.