161–170 of 242 posts
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…
Counterpoint: “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” — Roy Batty
Plato gave a better response with his allegory of the cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave Any information an AI has access to has been extracted from text, which isn't all that different to shadows on a cave wall in the ways that matter.
No doubt they'll be going to war too soon,-- they already are if you count propaganda!
There’s a certain quality to either having an AI written or AI assisted post like this. Impressive.
A 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.
But personally, I'm more optimistic. I'll bet it's more likely the AIs figure out consciousness down the road and explain it to us than the other way around. The limit to their intelligence seems effectively unbounded so far and they're starting to creep past us here and there. The AIs will have the advantage of being able to observe consciousness from the outside that we lack.
It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions.
But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up.
> an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.
High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed.
TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop.
Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.
Whoever wrote that thing though should burn in writer's hell, boiled forever in stale ink and old IBM keyboards. Five minutes of an older man god-moding a younger man and we have to suspend disbelief for the entire thing: oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. Every. Single. Thing. He got nothing wrong. Not one thing.
He goes on about the Capela Sistina' ssmell and then he switches to women and I'm "oh no he's gonna tell him 'you don't know what a woman tastes like'" or something weird and creepy like that. But, no, the kid's had sex! Already at his age? I read the LotR at high school! And then he's like "you don't know what it's like to wake up next to one woman being perfectly happy"... wait, what? How would you even know something like that? Have you had sex as a young man? And you weren't happy afterwards? Maybe there's something wrong with you then, not the kid?
Honestly, that's nothing but some kind of elder dude fantasy, or other. It could have been tolerable if it lasted for two minutes, maybe two and a half, but it goes on for far too long.
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 itse…
Don't say that. Adam Sandler might be reading these comments and...
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 itse…
There’s a 2000s British TV show along these lines called “How TV Ruined Your Life” by Charlie Brooker, who later created Black Mirror.
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…
And on the other hand we do have evidence to the contrary. AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this. It’s not capable of doing what a stand-up comedian does.
People will argue if and when these gaps can be closed. I think they can be in principle, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.