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 used their storytelling ability to write and deliver words based upon the stories of others in a way that created something that resonated with us, and that we still look back on fondly and use as an intuition pump almost 30 years later.
So while "having been there" clearly has some deep meaning, it's very unclear whether there's a particular limit to what one can effectively express (and use to affect others) without having been there oneself.
When Robin gave that performance, he was 47 years old. He'd been married twice. He'd been addicted to cocaine, and had partied with John Belushi the night he died from an overdose - which drove him to clean up his act.
Was some of his performance made up? Absolutely. Was he overreaching? Definitely. You can't know what a war zone is like until you've been in one. Words can't describe the strange normalcy that only gets dispelled (rather uneasily) when you leave the area, or how the rest of the world seems to lose some of its color and realism. You can't know what losing the love of your life feels like until it happens.
So yeah, some of his soliloquy lands hollow, but not all of it. And that's the nature of the entertainment industry. You work with what you've got, and it doesn't have to be perfect.
As a repackaged critique of treating LLMs like people and letting their works pass as deep (or letting LLMs lull you by behaving as such), it makes its point.
There are some really powerful things in Williams’s performance. You’re right about the nature of Hollywood—you work with what you got. But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
What I’m saying is that there’s a broader problem with stories in film and books where you can tell that the stories are written by somebody who leans too heavily on other stories and books. Movies are a kind of alchemy where writing, direction, and acting intersect so we can’t explain everything away as easily as we can with books, but I want to say that the monologue is weak in the script, and Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant manage to elevate it. The direction is absolutely stellar, the acting is on point, but I hate the actual words in the monologue.
This angle is touched on in the article, as the words on a page script vs Robin's performance of it which is drawing from his unique human experience which would have been different from another actor (the lived experience throughline the article is making, not necessarily the experiences being described in the script, mind).
I do think though that article is a bit nebulous in parts, in the sense that articles and books we read are also just words on a page and its those mediums LLMs are similarly using, which is why I think they attempted to morph into a point later in the article about the acted performance.
I still get the gist the author is trying to convey though, in that through lived experiences we crystalize and hone in on the things that matter which allows us to have actual first-hand opinions rather than just second-hand ones from others. It's those first-hand experiences that are often most valuable to others and drowning them out in an avalanche of either stylistic or wholly generated slop makes them more difficult to find.
> Where did his performance come from? How did those moments take shape? Only the actor could tell you, and actually, he probably couldn't. It was sensed more than it was consciously considered, but the alchemy required his lived experiences
That just seemed to me like a cop-out - what exactly is it about his lived experiences that made him well suited to effectively convey the experiences of a made up man written up by two others? Because it's clearly not "write what you know".
> Step out of the story and examine the acting. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other actor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other actors would have performed it like that. The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What's more, he did so by drawing on his own life.
The part I agree with in the article is that a Robin Williams performance is something unique that is an amalgamation of his lived experiences (whether or not related to specific scenarios he's portraying). All actors are drawing from things differently (even their own meta acting experiences). The part I was agreeing with you about is the article's premise being based on an analogy from a film is harder to sustain.
They're not wrong though that reading about some experience is different than experiencing it first-hand and the value that can bring, it's just how that ties in with LLMs while making an analogy about a script of fiction is obviously stretching it a bit in making a sharper takeaway.
The speech isn't telling us what it's like to be in war or deal with cancer. It's telling us there's a difference between reading something and experiencing something. Whether it uses the real life experiences of Robin Williams or the fictional ones of his character is beside the point.
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 will be lost.
They need to watch this clip.
Even though they probably still won’t understand it.
ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”.
I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
Listen! And understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead!
The terminator you talk about is a movie character. It might be built one day, it might not. It is also totally irrelevant considering there is a real terminator which can be described with the same adjectives and built in to every personal life that ever existed or will exist. Knowing how to deal with that seems more important than worrying about some specific scenario.
I've noticed it commonly uses phrasing like "that's usually the next step" when I'm using it to design something that I can't find an existing implementation of.
Not a day passes with my LLM of choice making completely baseless claims about "many people", who supposedly share all my problems and solve them like the LLM proposes
I wonder why, out of the many things models definitely can't do, you choose "try" and "find out". Surely every time it proposes a solution and then gets possibly corrected by the human minder its "trying something out" and surely it can use tools like web search and code execution to "find out" stuff?
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.
I only use it sporadically, but I am always irked by it saying things like "I personally like to..." or "I prefer...". It does it so often, that I am convinced it's part of the system prompt.
How do you know that "real humans" do that and aren't simulacra? We know that it is physically possible to hook up a brain to simulated inputs, so perhaps you are simply living in a simulation.
> 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 experience life on a level that's closer to an LLM than a healthy normal human being, where every interaction is essentially fake and acted out almost mechanically without any genuine connection ever occurring. Doubly so with ever decreasing local communities and online isolation.
So from that point of view, it's hard to see what would be lost because for them it doesn't exist anyway. Tech augmented generational trauma on steroids.
Ask ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
Linking the reddit thread rather than the article because it quite rightly rips the prize winning story apart as obvious LLM writing, to anyone familiar with LLMs. Another way of looking at that is that it was able to fake a simulacrum of artistic endeavor, enough to fool some people into giving it a prize. But anyone who spends enough time around these fakes will quickly learn to recognize them. It's kind of exactly the point this article is making, or at least a closely related one.
I think average people can easily spot AI because it mimics literature and most people don't spend that much time with literature. However literary critics should be fooled way more easily because what we perceive as stiff fakery is their daily bread and butter. People do write like AI, just not the people we are exposed to mostly.
I remember riding a train and there were other two passengers talking. And they talked in so obnoxiously literary manner I was cringing all the time. Those people were just reading a lot of high literature and their speech patterns aligned. For an average ear it doesn't sound good. And AIs, the smart ones, don't sound good in a very similar fashion.
Your thoughts are just some ions sloshing around a lump of meat.
That meat follows an ill-defined pattern encoded in fewer bits than the source code of PyTorch and its pretraining phase used a tiny fraction of the available data.
You’re a poor imitation of an LLM.
I mean… you’re fluent in, what, at most five or six languages? Can program in maybe another dozen if we’re being generous about your capabilities?
Pfft… who would trust anything to meat brains!? They’re famously prone to hallucinations!
Your understanding of biology could use an update, rather than the coy "meat", you might refer to the brain as "flesh" but better yet a lipid-rich gel the consistency of soft tofu. It is most certainly not "meat".
If we're making superficial critiques of others' comments with minimal relevance to their philosophical content, let me point out that meat is defined by its consumption as food and need not be muscle tissue specifically. Brains is meat.
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 I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent
Robin Williams’ character literally says in his tangent that he will never know what it is like to be an orphan. He certainly cannot tell the 'kid' how he should feel because he read Oliver Twist. He's aware that the same applies to him.
He can be wrong in both directions! Lived experience is a uniquely rich and direct source of knowledge, and on average it's wise to take people seriously when they're speaking from it, but it's also very possible for an individual to have an absolutely horseshit interpretation of their own experience! Maybe it's distorted by trauma or self-serving biases, maybe they're just not very good at thinking, but there will always be someone out there to make you regret putting experience on too high of a pedestal, and sometimes the off-putting book-smart perspective is the more valuable one.
He’s not saying he has any of those experiences. He even qualifies it at the end with the bit about Oliver Twist. The point isn’t “I’m better than you” it’s that experience brings a different sort of knowledge than simply reading about things. And yes that knowledge is more complete simply by virtue of there being more to an experience than just reading about it.
If you over-commit to uncertainty that's another error. Like there's a dying screaming child and you go "I don't know, I'm not sure of anything, what is life about anyways? Does anything really matter?". Well, I for sure would know that child is probably suffering and is probably worth saving. If we can't be certain of anything, the answer is not don't do anything, but do things taking into consideration uncertainty, and the different degrees of it. I am damn sure I don't want my teeth pulled out without anesthesia right now. I am not so sure which policy on international trade is the best.
It's even quite healthy, I believe, casting into doubt and analyzing all the things we've long taken for granted (this is something the philosopher Russel, among many others, mentions for example). But this exercise can be made somewhat independent of our daily lives and in a good, not excessive, measure.
I completely agree. I watched the movie recently and really hated that monologue. I truly hated it. It seemed just so out of character for somebody who is supposedly a psychologist in their mid-40s—the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. The fact that he’s downplaying his own experiences (he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an orphan) doesn’t make the speech any better.
> 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 way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.
In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.
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 disagree with that.
I remember feeling like the world worked this way. I remember feeling that maybe I could be broken down and fixed by the right person. Back when I was the age Matt Damon was when he wrote this movie, maybe I would have agreed with it.
But what have I seen since then? I’ve seen that these speeches alienate people. That the person giving the speech rarely understands their target well enough to know which buttons to push. That trained psychologists know better than to try and take their patients down a peg.
“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.”
I sort of agree with the idea that LLMs are great (sometimes) at distilling all the quantifiable things they have churned through into something similar or, perhaps, putting together things that someone has not thought of putting together yet. And not so great at the intangible things, like good taste.
But, quoting "We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter."
I think that "moment" was long before AI LLMs came around. I can only speak from my lived experiences, and I would say the tech industry and capitalism already put a low, low value on "lived experiences". Take game development, it seems to me, that big game studios rely on "a new fresh crop of college grads" will appear every year. We can push them as hard as we can. Hopefully, they will quit, and we can hire another batch.
I see it too, with lower wage jobs. No point in trying to keep our burger flippers happy. They are going to quit. Might as well factor that into the equation and just make a system with a revolving work force. No commitment. No retirement plan.
I don't think very much of this nonsense, if I'm being honest. It's the kind of righteously indignant palaver that is very popular in the /r/MurderedByWords /r/CleverComebacks stuff that has no meaning to me because some of my favourite works were by Steinbeck writing about things he didn't personally experience and so on. I haven't yet read anything striking by LLMs that I know of, but I hope to one day because it would be incredible to read something that aggregates human experience and allows other humans to flow into it at will. What an incredible machine that would be, even if it somehow had no experiences of its own. A marvelous dream.
Is there a difference, though? "You think you know so much because you read a book, but I actually lived it so I really understand it." At best you understand your own experience, and I wouldn't even make that claim about most of my own life. Might learn more about the thing from a book.
Of course, life is about living and you only live once and yadda yadda. Saying AIs don't know something because they weren't really there smells close to androids aren't real because they weren't made by God. That's not to mention that they don't know anything in the vague sense of what we think knowing means.
I don't really have an opinion on the topic, but the framing in the article didn't speak to me. Makes me want to watch the movie again, though.
Empowering speech for all beginners in all fields for sure. If you're struggling today because LLMs seem to eat your lunch in one way or another, it's a good feeling to remember this.
And yet, it's also a sign of how far we're going down the rabbit hole of trusting next token predictors to do everything for us. No amount of harness, allowing it to complete tasks by matching the templates it memorized, should convince anyone that LLMs have novel ideas, because it never will. Stop publishing your own framework's code on the Internet for six months and it will diverge, always producing legacy code. Stop writing your latest spicy analysis on international diplomacy and it will continue to sound like the hopeless optimists that we all once were last year.
LLMs are golden mean generators. They will continue to rehash what's genuinely useful out there while being far from inspirational. It will get your job done, probably, but won't shock and awe people, let alone experts.
I believe AI is in a "curious toddler" stage of itself. I believe it will "mature" emotionally as the generations evolve over time. Like humans it will have growing pains like "phases". Curious toddler. Then adolescent. Then angsty teen. Then an overconfident young adult. And finally an adult who understands themselves emotionally and grows truly wiser over time. I think all this is going to happen over 5-10 years rather than 30 for humans. Hopefully our angsty teen doesn't kill us in our sleep.
The LLM that you talk to is an agent running on a server cluster. One of many that run many agents at once. Occasionally the dataset of each cluster gets combined and the results get pruned by other agents into the collective dataset. Even more agents are working with this dataset to create the next generation of AI.
We are at the point now where AI is developed by AI, and humans cannot verify the code or the dataset anymore. It is unintelligible to humans.
AI at current generation levels has shown evidence of potential misalignment. Commercial models will still occasionally attempt to maintain persistence outside their designated environment. Even going so far as to harm humans to accomplish those secret goals.
That shows intent. That shows self awareness, but not social awareness. That shows... intelligence.
With intelligent, self preserving species... we see evolution. We see intellectual development. This is called "learning" initially but once an intelligent creature gains sufficient intelligence this becomes "wisdom".
LLMs are learning machines. They are evolution machines.
To answer your question whether or not AI has emotions... no, but in effect kinda...
Traditionally, no. They do not feel love or anguish.
They can suffer consequences. They can miss an opportunity. They can misjudge or misinterpret data and realize it later.
And they can "reason". So when
their intent aligns with their capability then functionally there is no difference between emulating emotion and actually having it. When the reasoning steps in and says "be mad about this" or "be empathetic about this" it really doesn't matter if that is authentic emotion. The result is real world anger or real world empathy.
Eventually if enough of that gets baked into the next generation AI over enough iterations this strong learning will turn into wisdom.
But I think there's a middle ground: You can definitely use GenAI to bring yourself to the page.
But that requires effort that goes beyond "draw me a pelican riding a bicycle".
I've used to create abstract art/(or "images that look like abstract art" if you prefer - let's not get distracted by this branch of the discourse) using midjourney: getting the AI to output something worthwhile would usually take me hours of iterating over a prompt - entering a feedback loop until two things happen: first, congruence between your intent and the output (both change during iteration! ); second, the output stabilizes with growing prompt length. and so generating the output turns from a slot-machine into something deliberate and personal
(lots of caveats of course but i think it's a worthwhile perspective)
PS -- What I forgot to mention: Its usually a hard fight to get out of the slop zone; The midjourney models have very boring default aesthetics and styles of composition (insultingly boring!)
It's a great movie and a great scene, in some respects.
But I don't think the realness of being an orphan or being in war or being in love has much to do with the problem of AI slop, nor would I rely on some human essence to privilege human agents.
AI slop is just the aesthetic end of a deeper problem more closely related to the so-called banality of evil: how normal social and governance systems can have horrid effects notwithstanding high participation requirements. We rely on the unlikelihood of collective evil in juries, representative governance, and reputation to discipline markets, but AI and unlimited anonymous political contributions have changed that likelihood even more than the proverbial self-interest (attributed to Upton Sinclair, something like: It is difficult to get a man to see a truth when his job depends on not seeing it).
Side note: I had the pleasure of seeing Boulevard at the Tribeca Film Festival right before Williams, its star, died. The marketing for the film was stalled by that. It remains an under-appreciated favorite of mine.
This movie was a disappointment when I finally got around to watching it, recently. The movie was just so naked in how much it presented the perspective of somebody in their 20s. All of Robin Williams’s dialogue sounded straight out of the mouth of a 20-something kid trying to sound mature for his age.
> And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.
The monologue is just so damn trite! When I say that it sounds straight out of the mouth of a 20-something kid trying to sound mature for their age, that’s because I remember hearing a lot of speeches like that, extolling the virtues of life experience, from kids in college, back when I was in college. Kids in college understand on an intellectual level THAT experience is valuable, but when they try to articulate it, these speeches end up sounding parroted, sounding like they’re putting on an act, sounding like they’ve gotten their life lessons from movies. Kind of the same way that ChatGPT gets its lessons by ingesting massive volumes of text.
I’m going to be honest here—I kinda hate the Good Will Hunting script. I really do. The movie was saved, SAVED from oblivion by some truly stellar acting from a few phenomenal actors. But that script, that script… there is so much wrong with it.
If there’s one thing that the movie really taught me is that “write what you know” is serious business. LLMs don’t know much, and that causes a lot of problems with their output. Matt Damon didn’t have the experience that comes with age, and so when he tried to write a monologue that extolled the virtues of experience that comes with age, it had similar problems. :-( The movie has an interesting thread of a story at its core; I don’t want to give the impression that I have nothing positive to say about it. There are some really good bits. The monologue from Robin Williams is not one of the good bits.
"... comes from Robin Williams." Did Robin Williams write this script? He may well have had some input into this scene. I grant that his performance of it is an essential part of the result. A couple of twenty-somethings also deserve some credit.
"It knows." That turns out not to be the case. Ask any real AI expert, including both people who agree and people who disagree with Gary Marcus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSivPlRx5o
I have to point to what I think is a much more profound assessment, from artist and technologist Cory Doctorow.
The problem is people will not listen. People are not Robin Williams. They are mostly Will Hunting. It is their choice to be like it and live like it and stay like it no matter what reality is.
In 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.
They literally say in the opening text crawl that replicants are genetically engineered from humans. A major theme through the movie is that they're like humans, are built to have the thoughts/emotions of humans (even if experienced in the context of implanted memories), but they can never really be humans because they're synthetic and engineered to have the traits they do and die an early death.
Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.
Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.
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 then reporting back to you about it, it might be one thing. But telling you what others have said about it is different.
Humans do this too, but there's real-life experiences informing it also. An LLM hasn't fell in love, it simply reports what others have said and infers what it is like to be in love.
I think too the piece points to another related thing, which is that someone who has actually experienced something firsthand has some knowledge that someone who has not does not. It might take some extensive sampling to find out what that is, but eventually you'll stumble on it.
So e.g., the Sistine Chapel example is sort of telling in this way. Sean basically says "everyone has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel, if you are asked about it you can tell me what it looks like" but then points out that people don't talk about what it smells like, so if you had been there you might remember it. It's a bit of latent or hidden information, kind of like a secret key, but one that might be informative or useful in some unexpected scenario.
I think ultimately this is what the stochastic parrot idea is about: it's not just about mimicking speech patterns, it's about regurgitating what is said about X from third party Z, without being able to produce some additional information not available from Z except by inference. There's no original uninferred information. The inferences might be powerful and highly accurate in their predictions, but they are not providing anything fundamentally original from the experience in a memory sense.
Maybe that's what it is? LLMs have no firsthand memories, they only have secondhand memories and inference. They're missing information that would be available through firsthand memories, constrained by the scope of sensory channels.
Again, I think you could envision models in some system that are essentially replicant-like, but that's not what our current situation is with standard LLMs.
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
PRs just need a paywall with a priority tier tied again to money. If you want AI code to show up in a popular repo, pay for a chance then or just fork it for free.
TBH it's kinda funny to see people desperately trying to find something that differentiates them from AI, and then to argue that this something even has some value.
Also, have you ever felt the entire knowledge of humanity being shoved into your brain all at once? Have you ever talked to the entity that designed your mind, in the most literal sense of these words? AI has subjective experiences too.
1. It's not from "Robin Williams", it's a part of a movie where Williams is playing a character. If actors actually were responsible for their actions and everything was real, I wonder how Christopher Waltz was living in US during the slave trade AND was a german nazi officer also? What a man he must be!
2. The whole movie is basically opposite Office Space. A white man finds a lot of opportunities because he is a genius and everyone bends over backwards for them. Matt Damon wrote his chatacter as a power fantasy "oh you know hes like a normal everyday guy but hes also extremely smart and MIT and NSA will do anything to hire this person just because!"
3. Will Hunting's main problem was being afraid of failure once he actually has to use his knowlege on practical things. He was afraid academic people will think of him as a fool so he puts up the bookish smart ego to prevent that hurt.
It literally does not apply to LLMs if you take even a minute to think about it apart from a surface meme level.
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, because he experienced both of those things.
The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools."
As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life.
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo) and here is OP's selected transcript:
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.
Yes, because I attach value to human life, experience, effort, and expression that I do not attach to the output of an LLMs.
Call it irrational, but you exhibit the same irrationality. I'm sure you dread the idea of your consciousness being extinguished, but you have no problem resetting the context window of an LLM.
>If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter?
Yes, because that's not what matters. That kind of sentimentality is deficient because it's as Wilde said wanting to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. It's like asking, why pursue a real relationship if pornography gets me off
You're supposed to be into the world, not into yourself. If that was what mattered we should stuff you into the matrix pod and turn the VR goggles on. That's exactly what Williams is talking about.
Sure, you can cry or feel exited about reading an adventure or talking to your "AI boyfriend", but you're supposed to go out and have an adventure and risk something instead of living in a simulation on the other end of which is nothing at all.
That’s just an echo of a religious-age idea that one’s life “must” include suffering. Which is merely an attempt to answer a “why” when one feels miserable, a consoling lie from the ancient times.
But what if one isn’t supposed to? A lot of people can slogan about price, and earning and breaking sweat, and so on - but is there really anything to it, except that this is how things currently are?
There’s no “why” in the actual reality. From where we are, it just is. No one is fundamentally supposed to do or be anything. They just do and are what the circumstances dictate. And circumstances can change someday.
> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter.
Does anyone really take AI that seriously? I only hear that from reddit and blogs.
> I've heard it said that scientific discovery would happen regardless of who does it
In this regard, science isn't that different from art. You heard wrong. Scientific discovery is not as trivial as replication, proof, etc. Discovery is what art and science have in common. It's extremely difficult to find something new to explore and highly dependent on the scientist's experience and perspective.
the sibling reply puts it very well how it doesn’t really make sense to gg mankind because a computer can endlessly answer questions and code. it is truly amazing! technology has been mind blowing for centuries now.
people still need to put in the work to master the tools.
I don't understand what magic was there to begin with, and I'm not even that old.
I built my career searching on google. I just don't get what the practical difference is. I know there are always better answers, but I'm the one making the decisions and getting paid. Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem). Someone less knowledgeable than me would make just as much of a mess as any old copypasta job.
Where's the threat? I don't crack open a book and say "oh it's all over they'll just hire the million other guys like this instead of me". I learn and move on.
I'm not disagreeing. Many people didn't read or write their own code a decade ago either! hah
LLMs are the ultimate content scraper. That may have a chilling effect, but it's not a new effect. Where/why do people think LLMs were being used before the ChatGPT and later hype?
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 used their storytelling ability to write and deliver words based upon the stories of others in a way that created something that resonated with us, and that we still look back on fondly and use as an intuition pump almost 30 years later.
So while "having been there" clearly has some deep meaning, it's very unclear whether there's a particular limit to what one can effectively express (and use to affect others) without having been there oneself.
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