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

jayacunzo.com

221–230 of 242 posts

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

#221

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…

This is a bit of a straw man. There obviously is a huge gap between knowing the human condition from living through it versus just having "read" about it during training.

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

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost I have a pet theory on why that's the case and why this monologue fits so well. I think there's a variety of conditions, from straight up sociopathy, to Will's type of CPTSD, autistic masking, and probably a hell of a lot more that makes a person experie…

You’re describing sociopathy.

Yes that's the far end of the spectrum and that part is certainly fact. While I have no doubt that most CEOs who are driving the AI shoehorning decisions have some of that going for them [0], I don't think you need to be nearly that far along to get a similar practical experience just via alienation and isolation.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20422644/

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

#224

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.

It's literally called in-context learning. The fact that it doesn't go into weights and is retained only for a session doesn't mean no learning occurs.

Also agentic systems may choose or be instructed to retain some information between sessions in files and/or databases which is also a form of learning.

There are experiments with retaining session information in weights in some form of lora but there's no consensus if it's even desirable. There's a value in being able to start from a clean slate.

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

#225

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.

These things are a centrifuge seperating humanity into people who say things like "it definitely learns" and those who do not.

It can't do a thing. You tell it how to do a thing. It now can do a thing. That's the definition of learning. Your centrifuge separates people who are not afraid to believe in what is reality, from the ones that do.

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

#226
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

#227
post #163

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.

Not so in the domains of computer operation, programming, and mathematical reasoning where RL and self-distillation can be used. Presumably beyond that but those at least can be done at a large scale. No doubt they'll be going to war too soon,-- they already are if you count propaganda!

I've read this through a few times and I'm afraid I can't understand how this relates to my comment.

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

#228
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We disagree on whether there is a meaningful gap to close. For LLMs confusing an argued lack of consciousness (we cannot even define ours) for a given lack of agency is a category error in my view. And agency is the threat vector.

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

#229

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…

You're talking about acting vs. lived experience. That doesn't invalidate the premise of the article, it actually strengthens it if you aren't overly pedantic in your read and interpretation.

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

#230

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…

Celebrities have experienced way more and way crazier sh*t than we ever have.
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