Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

jayacunzo.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 242 posts

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

#121

Post by Barrin92 »

drdaeman wrote: post #112
Barrin92 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 p…

> 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…

>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.

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

#122

Post by ilvez »

klodolph wrote: post #94
kstenerud wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ge…

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…

> 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.

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

#123

Post by gorgoiler »

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…

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.

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

#124

Post by red75prime »

kstenerud wrote: post #87
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…

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 ge…

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.

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

#125

Post by globular-toast »

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.

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

#126

Post by t43562 »

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…

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.

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

#127

Post by IshKebab »

timacles wrote: post #50
sourdecor wrote: post #10

'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?

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

#128

Post by roncesvalles »

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 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.

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

#129

Post by avadodin »

Toutouxc wrote: post #91
shermantanktop wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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

#130

Post by izucken »

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.

Post reply on HN