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

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

#171

Post by Verdex »

netcan wrote: post #166

To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience? 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…

I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it.

This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far.

The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop.

Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale.

Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.

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

#172

Post by treespace8 »

I find at the heart of all this AI slop is a deep sadness at the loss of connection. It used to be when I read something, or saw something that I knew it was real. Someone created it for me to experience. It was a form of connection.

But now I'm no longer certain. Unless I really know the source, have met them in person, or seen them talk I just don't know if what I'm trying to connect with is real.

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

#173

Post by cgio »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #170
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…

That observation doesn’t really prove that the argument fails, right? Just because analogies were used powerfully beyond the experience of a writer doesn’t let us conclude that AI has transcended or will soon transcend the value of all qualia (Mary’s room thought experiment). 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…

Qualia mualia. This is a fear argument that actually makes the danger more pertinent. Chalmers’ zombies, they are as benevolent and as mischievous as their qualia’d mirrors as far as their functional presentation. We put our qualia as a token in a pocket and think they will protect us somehow, like the bad eye pins. There is no gap to close. An agent is an agent. We leash it because we know the danger and just wish to manage it. But you cannot cage something you build to be stronger than your helpless cage made of ablation and instruct. Our qualia are there, their relevance to the discussion is questionable.

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

#174

Post by cgio »

aeve890 wrote: post #117
scotty79 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

>It definitely learns things. By the very way this technology works they can't learn anything after training. What you think is "learning" it's just a session log written back to the context when you resume the session.

And what is written when you wake up from sleeping?

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

#176

Post by GTP »

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #167

I concede that Robin Williams was a good actor and a real professional. It takes one (of each) to deliver such a dumb monologue with grace and conviction, without stumbling over the inane blandness of the material. He carries it through like the pro he clearly was. 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…

> 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.

He says exactly the opposite: that he can't know about the guy just because he read Oliver Twist and would be fascinated to hear about him, about the real person the guy intimately is.

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

#177

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#178

Post by arcticfox »

taffydavid wrote: post #175

I always thought it ironic that this beautiful speech about life experience was written by 2 20-something "scared shitless kid"s for Robin Williams to deliver.

I just heard it for the first time but why is that ironic? Isn't the point about feeling and not age?

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

#179

Post by pdpi »

taffydavid wrote: post #175

I always thought it ironic that this beautiful speech about life experience was written by 2 20-something "scared shitless kid"s for Robin Williams to deliver.

It makes perfect sense — what separates Will from Ben and Matt is that they’re willing to acknowledge the difference exists. They’re willing to say “we have this, but we don’t have that”.

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

#180

Post by zacksiri »

I watched this movie recently, and the same thought crossed my mind. I was going to write a blog post about it, but was too afraid to read the responses. I'm glad you did. If I meet you I'd buy you a cup of coffee, we'd talk and we'd become friends.
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