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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

#201

Post by grantcas »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #136
hexasquid wrote: post #135

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.

[dead]

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

#202

Post by joenot443 »

arcticfox wrote: post #178
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?

The argument Robin Williams character is presenting is roughly that reading about experiences as a young person is less genuine than personally living through said experiences. Perhaps that there's more merit to a belief when it comes from someone who founded it through their own lived experience than a belief which comes from reading about others' experiences.

The irony is that Good Will Hunting (an outstanding film, FWIW) was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were very young. The belief that experience is necessary to true understanding is perhaps advice they'd gotten from someone else, not an axiom they came to through _their_ experience.

It doesn't make Williams' monologue any less true, and I imagine 30y later Damon and Affleck they'd stand by the advice, but it does make for an interesting philosophical quirk.

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

#203

Post by falcor84 »

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…

> AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this

I'm reminded of this interview with Casparov from 1989 (less than 10 years before he lost to Deep Blue):

>A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?[0]

Well, we have AI beating everyone at chess and conducting interviews...

[0] https://en.chessbase.com/post/edward-winters-che-exploration...

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

#204

Post by tmtvl »

moffkalast wrote: post #118
librasteve wrote: post #97

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

Not sure how that's a counterpoint, replicants are supposed to be just kind of mildly genetically adjusted humans grown in vats aren't they? People act towards them like they are robots because it's easier to mentally justify a slave underclass that way.

It's a counterpoint because nobody has seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion or c-beams in the dark near the Tanhaeuser (okay, writing that is weird because a-umlaut by itself is fine to write as ae, but a-umlaut-u is pronounced more like 'oy'), yet despite nobody having experienced those things the speech is still famously evocative.

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

#205

Post by low_tech_love »

jimbokun wrote: post #8

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…

Honest question: how do you think you contributed to the discussion by throwing some AI slop into an AI slop conversation?

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

#206

Post by roncesvalles »

ezst wrote: post #139
roncesvalles wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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)

It is a search engine in the sense that it's returning to you a subset of knowledge from a large body of knowledge stored within it. Natural language is simply the interface by which you make the query and by which it can return its results.

And true, it's not deterministic in our experience, but this is an optimization. You could make it so that one particular prompt always returns the same response every single time; the random jitter is "added in" because it happens to produce better results overall.

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

#207

Post by handfuloflight »

If you take this fantasy monologue too seriously, then you undermine the reality of people like Hellen Keller.

And, the smell of the Sistine Chapel is irrelevant to its essence, meaning that data does not say anything about the Sistine Chapel itself, just exclusionary for the sake of exclusion.

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

#208

Post by scotty79 »

klodolph wrote: post #65
munificent wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. That's the entire point . That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief". Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only…

> That's the entire point. Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense. People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. They don’t take off their mask because you make a big speech and confront them about it. The perspective that this speech has—it is telling me that a forceful, paternalistic approach can fix people. If somebody needs to talk but won’t, you can break down the walls. I di…

> Yeah, that’s the entire point, and I think it makes no sense. > People will take off their mask if they feel like it’s safe. > [...] > I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people.

In recent years I grew to hate narratives. They give the readers the illusion of attaining some deeper understanding of actual reality (of human psychology in this case). While what the actually do is just pushing readers further away from the truth in the direction of a particular deviation in perception of reality that the writer had.

Given narrative is most attractive for the people who have similar errors in the perception of reality that the author had and reading pushes them further away. Confirming their biases. Regardless of what the reality actually is.

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

#209

Post by ghusto »

Stop grabbing and straws and evolve. What you thought made you valuable, has been devalued.

You were never your output anyway, but you thought you were and got your self-worth from it, so now you're clutching at any argument against AI. But you don't need to! Your worth was never that you could do that computer stuff that others didn't understand.

Now adapt and move on.

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

#210

Post by mrugge »

ghusto wrote: post #209

Stop grabbing and straws and evolve. What you thought made you valuable, has been devalued. You were never your output anyway, but you thought you were and got your self-worth from it, so now you're clutching at any argument against AI. But you don't need to! Your worth was never that you could do that computer stuff that others didn't understand. Now adapt and move on.

Will, is that you?
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