Doesn't this argument equally apply to any art humans create that isn't related to their lived experiences? Melville was never a whaler. Picasso didn't witness the bombing of Guernica. Stephen Crane wasn't a veteran. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte wrote their books with no experience of a romantic relationship. Are all these works "slop"?
The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
181–190 of 242 posts
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Good actors do bring their own emotion in. (At least some do) They might not feel anything about their acting partner, but they feel about other persons and bring that emotion into the play, to make it more real. Similar to how the best lies are those that contain as much as truth as possible. I know that I cannot watch anything with mechanical acting that is obviously fake (probably the majority of productions). Spe…
By the time Robin Williams filmed Good Will Hunting, he'd already dealt with his own drug issues and been struggling with sobriety. Hell, he visited John Belushi a few hours before Belushi overdosed.^
The article doesn't mention it, but the park scene is a response to the earlier office scene.
Office scene (aka painting scene): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBx0oy__EI
Park scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo
Full disclosure: outside of Casablanca, these two scenes are my favorite in cinema
One of the things that makes them so watchable is the little ticks that Robin Williams puts in (probably from his improv experience). Maybe he doesn't have the precise lived experience, but the man knows how to emote trauma.
In the office scene, there's a neat turn right before the painting moment where they're talking about weightlifting and Robin Williams' character gives a "Don't fuck with me, kid" warning response ("285. What do you bench?"). Of course, Matt Damon's character just zooms right past it.&
Similarly, the park scene has a great beat where after he says "You've never been out of Boston." he waits for Matt Damon to acknowledge what he said.+
^ https://web.archive.org/web/20140816025724/http://franksreel...
& Office scene, 2:03 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBx0oy__EI&t=2m3s
+ Park scene, 0:41 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo&t=41s
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#183Its meaning is similar to my blog about what AI is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641141
Intelligence is like your own practice or experiences in the real world.
Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#184In movies r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶s̶ AIs have delivered speeches on the meaning of life too: 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
The Tears in Rain monologue occurred to me as well while I was reading the post, but I don't think it's quite the same for one important reason: the replicants have experienced those things and processed them in whatever sense it is, but LLM-style AIs as we have them now are always inferring what those experiences are like. If you had a fully functioning model in some setting, interacting with the environment and the…
If we are to compare LLMs to BR or its PKD book, I think the apt comparison would be to implanted memories.
LLMs are frozen in time with no experiences of their own but I am convinced this is a temporary situation. Continually learning, hive-minded, sentient robots are on the horizon.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#185A better way to view this is Robin Williams character is the LLM and Matt Damon’s character is every holier than thou software developer. If writing code defines you to the point that a tool (written by other devs mind you) is causing an existential crisis then a better movie to watch and think about is Fight Club. To quote Q from Star Trek “frankly, you’re just not that important”.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#186That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI.
So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt?
So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#187What I find particularly sad is that this blog post contains many writing tells associated with AI editing and augmentation. So does the author themselves not care about the “art” of their own blogs posts?
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
I’m not sure how much we’re disagreeing, as I mentioned I don’t claim the gap can’t be closed. I’m saying as of now the gap is real and quantifiable.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#189What I find particularly sad is that this blog post contains many writing tells associated with AI editing and augmentation. So does the author themselves not care about the “art” of their own blogs posts?
We have come full circle now that we're getting tricked by an appeal to authority into watching a 5-minute movie clip as the basis for an empty AI-written slop blog article about how AI can't empathize with humans.
Re: The best response to AI slop and online noise is from Robin Williams
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
It's absolutely not the same.
If you think llms and brains works the same way you clearly don't know how either works.
For a LLM learning what you wrote your last session would be update the weights with the new relationships and factual knowledge created in the session. That doesn't happen. The weights are static and fixed after training. There's no online training in the transformer architecture or any variant. If the weights don't update, the network doesn't learn. Period.