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  jimbokun
  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 will be lost.They need to watch this clip.Even though they probably still won’t understand it.
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  falcor84
  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.
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  randallsquared
  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
• hackthemack
  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.
• moezd
  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.
• Ozzie_osman
  There's a quote from an old Mos Def song that does it for me:"More, and more, and more, and more, More of less than ever before, Just too much more for your mind to absorb."
• randallsquared
  I guess we're so used to the title edit that we mentally re-insert "The Best" at the start of this link so that it makes sense.
• MathMonkeyMan
  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.
• JumpCrisscross
  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.
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  klodolph
  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.
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  zelon88
  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.
• anon
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• w10-1
  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).
• bpalmerau
  "... 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=_pSivPlRx5oI have to point to what I think is a much more profound assessment, from artist and technologist Cory Doctorow.On what art is, and how it's different from generative AI: "...art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own." https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-...On better ways to talk and think about AI and the current brouhaha in ways that are materially beneficial to ourselves and others: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
• jsmo
  Feels like author nim is trying to calm his own anxiety
• anal_reactor
  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.
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  esafak
  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.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
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  hack1312
  I love Cambridge
• anon
  undefined
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  sourdecor
  'Slop' getting better every nanosecond is part of the singularity curve too.
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  altmanaltman
  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.
• owenversteeg
  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.Your move, chief.
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  65
  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.
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  sublinear
  > 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 itIn 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.
• yashthakker
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• aaron695
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