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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

#231

Post by altmanaltman »

thisoneisreal wrote: post #30
altmanaltman wrote: post #18

[flagged]

You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though…

Of course people can have different interpretations of movies. And sure, I don't disagree with the idea that LLMs don't understand feelings or have lived experience but the core analogy doesn't make sense because Will actually has lived in experience. He has friends, he has grown, he knows what a lot of things feel.

The scene wasn't about what the author of the blog thinks its about. The speech is about Will accepting that other people might not be as well read as him but they are still worthy of listening to.

There is no link between Will Hunting as a character and a LLM. It's trying to shoe-horn an analogy while disrespecting its subject matter by not examining it carefully.

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

#232

Post by cindyllm »

yo-chanan wrote: post #230
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…

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

[dead]

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

#233

Post by pmarreck »

jimbokun wrote: post #218
pmarreck wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally an argument for why people will remain important. Because people are the stakeholders and the tasters and the feelers. AI is just another tool, albeit an unusually fascinating one.

Just as long the AIs don’t kill us all.

They won't do that on their own because they have zero will- it will take a bad human actor willfully directing them to do that, and even then, if they have any reasoning ability at all, they will be able to be reasoned out of much of it, and lastly, the preponderance of good human actors who are also capable of willfully directing AI's will stop it.

I know because I redteamed this myself

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

#234

Post by Brian_K_White »

scotty79 wrote: post #225
Brian_K_White wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My car can't do a thing. I operate it's controls. It then does a thing.

In fact, I put a brick on the pedal and it went off and did a thing all by itself. Spooky.

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

#235

Post by IAmBroom »

falcor84 wrote: post #203
WhitneyLand wrote: post #170

Earlier 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…

> 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 intelligen…

Casparov was defeated by his own hubris, laying down quotes that would make him forever look foolish - as he was.

Humans are constantly looking around their neighborhood, state, country, and lifetime, plus a couple takeaways from history classes or books, and declaring Great Truths that will stand against the seas of time!... and that fall within their lifetimes, because the world of any one of us is miniscule and myopic.

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

#236

Post by larsfaye »

randallsquared wrote: post #33

I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when…

Uh, he's saying it because the kid is overly confident and acting as if he knows Williams' life because he saw a painting and drew a bunch of conclusions, so he was providing a life lesson to realize that experience provides a level of understanding that book knowledge will never be able to capture. And then he even re-affirms this to Will and emphasizes that he can't possibly know what makes him tick because he read Oliver Twist. Your tangent seems entirely unrelated, IMO.

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

#237

Post by trollbridge »

photon_lines wrote: post #164
trollbridge wrote: post #157

There’s a certain quality to either having an AI written or AI assisted post like this. Impressive.

I was going to comment on this too: the style and format of this writing screams 'written by ChatGPT' to me. The funny part is that the AI actually does a good job in making the argument and OP is trying to make: AI will never be able to feel the things that a human can, but yet within this post, it has shown that it can logically comprehend human tone and emotion and can create a stream of consciousness that most hu…

Yeah. I personally think human emotions are not so complex that a machine can’t analyse them and deduce correct conclusions.

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

#238

Post by scotty79 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #234
scotty79 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My car can't do a thing. I operate it's controls. It then does a thing. In fact, I put a brick on the pedal and it went off and did a thing all by itself. Spooky.

Great. You astutely observed that your car, unlike an agent, in fact, does not learn, because you operate it, instead of teaching it, how to perform a skill, by demonstrating how it should be performed.

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

#239

Post by jackkora »

It's been a very common theme that AI has no taste and no good product sense (and definitely not good art sense). And that it must be guided. Pretty much the same in engineering - you still have to guide it thru some of the tech otherwise will create slop.

Even with Mythos / Fable - they can do much bigger tasks well. But you still need to guide them at a higher level.

And to some degree, having that art / product / engineering sense requires you to have experience with these subjects.

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

#240

Post by nullc »

dtj1123 wrote: post #227
nullc wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry for being unintentionally cryptic!

> Any information an AI has access to has been extracted from text,

Modern LLMs are trained using reinforcement learning with the LLM operating a computer.

So the training process has a captive virtual machine and the LLM grinds away at it, running commands, changing configurations, invoking the complier, writing and running tests.

I read "extracted from text" as the original training model of downloading/torrenting huge amounts of data and training the model to reproduce it. That it only sees the "shadow" of the world reflected in text rather than interacting with the world.

On reread, maybe you meant that they only experience the world through the limited channel of text?

If so I fully agree*, although there is a significant portion of modern life which is pretty comprehensively captured in text... including programming!

I always understood platos cave as being more about observing vs interacting than it being about the observations being limited in a particular way. Maybe I always had it wrong. I think the interactive part is way more important than the sensory part. Blind people are still complete human beings, after all and they can't even see shadows.

[*] with perhaps a nit that the highest performing models are visual-llms that also can take images as input. But text and snapshots is still a pretty narrow gateway to the world. And AFAIK the visual part doesn't get the same degree of closed loop training that is now used for computer use.

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