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."
The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
131–140 of 242 posts
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#132Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#134One 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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#135A 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?
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#136A 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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#138I'm not sure it's actually a great response to AI slop. The main problem with it is it isn't very good.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#139I 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.
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)
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#140I mean I defo wouldn't categorize ChatGPT as "smart and capable and good" at anything.