In season 1 episode 2 of The Audacity JoAnne tells Duncan that "information is not insight" and that's a similar argument to this.
The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
141–150 of 242 posts
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bo…
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 experie…
Pretty sure Robin Williams did live the human experience.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#143It'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…
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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#145Earlier 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.
> 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.
These things are a centrifuge seperating humanity into people who say things like "it definitely learns" and those who do not.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#146Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#147Toss 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.)
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#148It'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 itse…
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.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#149I 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…
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?
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#150Is 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