6 ms·

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

405 points by herbertl 3mo ago

sublinear 3mo ago
> 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.
- mingus88 3mo ago
  > Does anyone really take AI that seriously? Surely you have heard the stories of people using LLMs as girlfriends, therapists and drug trip guides right? Sometimes with fatal results? Yes, people are taking LLMs very seriously.
- fn-mote 3mo ago
  >> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter. > Does anyone really take AI that seriously? Young people are having a very hard time developing a feeling of competence because LLMs produce better work than beginners in many fields. Without experience as a beginner, it is hard to progress to a level where you don’t believe in the magic anymore.
  - sublinear 3mo ago
    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.
    - jplusequalt 3mo ago
      >Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem) Yes they are. Read some of the comments on this website and you'll hear that many people no longer write or read their own fucking code.
      - sublinear 3mo ago
        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?
  - apsurd 3mo ago
    llms don’t produce anything on their own. 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.
deleted 3mo ago
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esafak 3mo ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue
- manytimesaway 3mo ago
  Replicants are not robots, and are arguably not AI. LLMs aren't AI either, but once the bullshit's out of the bag...
  - teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
    AI can be anything from depth first search to superhuman intelligence on a chip. I like to refer to it as automated statistics.
    - yggy 3mo ago
      Guessing machine
- jimbokun 3mo ago
  You know the actor playing the part of the robot was a human being…right?
  - NopIdoN 3mo ago
    according to him
    - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
      wait, he has officially made a statement?
aaron695 3mo ago
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jimbokun 3mo ago
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.
- SoftTalker 3mo ago
  It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.
  - mingus88 3mo ago
    And an LLM is just generating a token stream from a set of model weights
    - jiggawatts 3mo ago
      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!
      - genxy 3mo ago
        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".
sourdecor 3mo ago
'Slop' getting better every nanosecond is part of the singularity curve too.
- timacles 3mo ago
  define better slop will never have substance
  - IshKebab 3mo ago
    Never? Never is a long time. There are already plenty of things AI can do that people confidently said would never happen. I'm guessing you're one of the "it can't think" crowd?
  - Brian_K_White 3mo ago
    more effective
  - Jtarii 3mo ago
    Slop will never be high art but it will absolutely be good enough for 90+% of people. Marvel movies are slop, and they are the most successful thing ever made.
hackthemack 3mo ago
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.
altmanaltman 3mo ago
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- thisoneisreal 3mo ago
  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.
  - altmanaltman 3mo ago
    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.
65 3mo ago
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.
- deleted 3mo ago
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- zerobees 3mo ago
  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.
- Barrin92 3mo ago
  >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.
  - drdaeman 3mo ago
    > luxury of an emotion without paying for it 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.
owenversteeg 3mo ago
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 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.
randallsquared 3mo ago
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.
hack1312 3mo ago
I love Cambridge
- vardalab 3mo ago
  Scene is in Boston Public Garden
  - hack1312 3mo ago
    Yes but Harvard, where the majority of the movie takes place, is in Cambridge. And that’s where I lived (well, Somerville). The Public Garden is obv beautiful as well, that whole area of downtown is great.
bpalmerau 3mo ago
"... 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 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. 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-up/#invisible-hand 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-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
w10-1 3mo ago
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).
randallsquared 3mo ago
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
- trescenzi 3mo ago
  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.
- jiqiren 3mo ago
  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.
  - OrsonSmelles 3mo ago
    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.
zelon88 3mo ago
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.
- IAmGraydon 3mo ago
  A bizarre post, for certain. You’re saying you believe LLMs have emotions? What are you basing that on?
  - zelon88 3mo ago
    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.
    - IAmGraydon 3mo ago
      I see.
      - 3mo ago
yashthakker 3mo ago
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klodolph 3mo ago
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.
- yohannparis 3mo ago
  Maybe because it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Afleck, which at the time they were in their 20's
  - klodolph 3mo ago
    Yes, that’s what I was getting at. Matt Damon didn’t have the kind of life experiences to write a good version of that speech, so we got the version in the movie, which sucks.
falcor84 3mo ago
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.
- Springtime 3mo ago
  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.
  - falcor84 3mo ago
    Are you referring to this part? > 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".
JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
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.
jsmo 3mo ago
Feels like author nim is trying to calm his own anxiety
MathMonkeyMan 3mo ago
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.
moezd 3mo ago
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 3mo ago
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."
anal_reactor 3mo ago
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deleted 3mo ago
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fithisux 3mo ago
Very good article. 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. Humanity is broken beyond repair.
ai-may-i 3mo ago
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librasteve 3mo ago
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
- moffkalast 3mo ago
  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.
  - tmtvl 3mo ago
    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.
- e40 3mo ago
  Not going to downvote you, but you missed the point of Roy Batty and his speech. Roy’s mind was indistinguishable from humans, and that’s why he was feared by humans and was given an artificially short lifespan. And the quote you referenced proves his humanity.
chr15m 3mo ago
The map is not the territory.
Garlef 3mo ago
I like it; 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!)
villgax 3mo ago
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.
arjie 3mo ago
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.
rib3ye 3mo ago
Is this clip from Good Will Hunting really a rip on vibe coding? It seems more akin to a linux kernel eng talking down to a react developer.
- CuriousSkeptic 3mo ago
  You can substitute Robin Williams with Peter Naur, and the speech with his “Programming as Theory Building” essay, and that is more or less what you’ll get
ricardobayes 3mo ago
I think we are entering an era where everything is meaningless, shallow and profit-driven. Even art of all things will fade. Sure we'll figure out cancer and live till 110 but at what cost?
negergreger 3mo ago
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globular-toast 3mo ago
I think this point about experience does get at something with AI slop. But there's at least another couple of things I would add: AI has no taste, nor does it have skin in the game. I only use LLMs to generate code, but I'm sure it's the same for everything else. Taste is a difficult thing to pin down, but you know it when you see it. LLMs can regurgitate things it's seen that had good taste, but every now and then it will produce something with no taste. This shows that it, fundamentally, does not understand the difference. The more important thing, though, is skin in the game. Quite simply, it does not care. It can't care. Having no taste is a big part of that, but it also won't have to deal with the consequences of its actions. People are quick to say this stuff is intelligent, but it's easy to sound intelligent when that's all you do. People have to actually be intelligent because they are going to feel the results of their actions later.
izucken 3mo ago
The levels of irony here are peaking. - slop article that itself feels AI generated; - using a movie quote, like, from an actor and script and stuff; - a quote that itself is super smug and on the nose; - saying something so self evident even an AI wouldn't assume; - to fight the powah of llm's overtaking the slop article field; An LLM itself doesn't personally come to you to ruin you, and pretend that it is superior to you or knows you. Unless, it is wired to do that. Unless it is used by some other unique snowflake to ruin. Freaking deepseek will always remind you that it's a box without a lived experience or feelings. If your box assumes a personhood, look not at it, but at the guy who sells it.
ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago
Somehow, I was reminded of this Mark Twain quote: > "War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull."
piokoch 3mo ago
One of the striking things about LLM-s is verbosity. A junior guy had to do some task and create docs how (a rather simple) change needs to be done. He produced, using Copilot (all those hyphens, additional lines between paragraphs, etc.) , a long dissertation that included some rather poor analogies and that could have been summarized in 5 sentences. Yet I had to go through that writing. Same with the code. Generate Apache Kafka listener using Spring Kafka. Here you go, my human boss, the code is ready. The code is ready, but, somehow some outdated tutorial or Stackoverflow answer must have kicked in, hence it produced some totally unnecessary factory of factories that Java loves so much, but could be replaced with a few lines in the properties file. But, when notified, Copilot kindly agreed that that factory is not really need and I am right.
hexasquid 3mo ago
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?
- forgotusername6 3mo ago
  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.
  - LogicFailsMe 3mo ago
    TBF humans will never have the experience of what it's like to be an AI by those rules either. The confident assertions about the nature of consciousness so many make despite still having no real idea what it is astound me. But personally, I'm more optimistic. I'll bet it's more likely the AIs figure out consciousness down the road and explain it to us than the other way around. The limit to their intelligence seems effectively unbounded so far and they're starting to creep past us here and there. The AIs will have the advantage of being able to observe consciousness from the outside that we lack.
  - grantcas 3mo ago
    [dead]
- YurgenJurgensen 3mo ago
  Just another couple of years and a few more trillion, and the whole world’s semiconductor and data output and it’ll be useful. Trust me bro.
tim333 3mo ago
I'm not sure it's actually a great response to AI slop. The main problem with it is it isn't very good.
everyone 3mo ago
I mean I defo wouldn't categorize ChatGPT as "smart and capable and good" at anything.
aorth 3mo ago
In season 1 episode 2 of The Audacity JoAnne tells Duncan that "information is not insight" and that's a similar argument to this.
B1FF_PSUVM 3mo ago
Toss P.K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" at that essay. (Hey, sixty years of publication. And it may not even be the first "implanted memories" story around, googles give an 1892 precursor.)
bloomingeek 3mo ago
I think most posters are missing the point. They're over thinking the scene. Ai can never feel anything. Info isn't the same as knowledge, knowledge isn't the same as wisdom. We humans are too complex to be answered by the infinite knowledge of Ai. IF we care about the possible harm it can be to humans, we can then properly deal with the use of Ai. It's a wonderful tool for some things, however, we tend to over do everything when it comes to tech. Humans matter, but can we trust corporations or governments to protect us from Ai?
dtj1123 3mo ago
Plato gave a better response with his allegory of the cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- nullc 3mo ago
  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!
  - dtj1123 3mo ago
    I've read this through a few times and I'm afraid I can't understand how this relates to my comment.
    - nullc 3mo ago
      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.
trollbridge 3mo ago
There’s a certain quality to either having an AI written or AI assisted post like this. Impressive.
- photon_lines 3mo ago
  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 humans can connect with and understand.
  - trollbridge 3mo ago
    Yeah. I personally think human emotions are not so complex that a machine can’t analyse them and deduce correct conclusions.
KolmogorovComp 3mo ago
The reality is that the extremely large majority of people (especially in developed countries), have not experienced anything close to Robin William's character, nor do they have the slightest portion of Damon's character knowledge. So it's a weak argument against LLM. But the extract is just an example for the author, whose thinking really boils down to "human have something that machine will never replace". It's fine if you believe in supernatural force, but otherwise, it's just another jest of human arrogance. That's not to say transformer architecture will be enough to completely outcompete humans, I have the honesty to say I don't know.
netcan 3mo ago
To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience? It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions. But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up. > an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars. High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed. TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop. Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.
- Verdex 3mo ago
  I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it. This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far. The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop. Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale. Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.
  - fzzzy 3mo ago
    Continuation passing style by spawning a new thread with the continuation function. Wow. I remember trying to wrap my head around how Erlang implemented infinite loops with recursion (tail recursion with a trampoline I guess?) but never would have guessed it could be done in C by spawning a thread.
YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago
I concede that Robin Williams was a good actor and a real professional. It takes one (of each) to deliver such a dumb monologue with grace and conviction, without stumbling over the inane blandness of the material. He carries it through like the pro he clearly was. Whoever wrote that thing though should burn in writer's hell, boiled forever in stale ink and old IBM keyboards. Five minutes of an older man god-moding a younger man and we have to suspend disbelief for the entire thing: oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. Every. Single. Thing. He got nothing wrong. Not one thing. He goes on about the Capela Sistina' ssmell and then he switches to women and I'm "oh no he's gonna tell him 'you don't know what a woman tastes like'" or something weird and creepy like that. But, no, the kid's had sex! Already at his age? I read the LotR at high school! And then he's like "you don't know what it's like to wake up next to one woman being perfectly happy"... wait, what? How would you even know something like that? Have you had sex as a young man? And you weren't happy afterwards? Maybe there's something wrong with you then, not the kid? Honestly, that's nothing but some kind of elder dude fantasy, or other. It could have been tolerable if it lasted for two minutes, maybe two and a half, but it goes on for far too long.
- GTP 3mo ago
  > oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. He says exactly the opposite: that he can't know about the guy just because he read Oliver Twist and would be fascinated to hear about him, about the real person the guy intimately is.
- rchaud 3mo ago
  How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing. When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.
treespace8 3mo ago
I find at the heart of all this AI slop is a deep sadness at the loss of connection. It used to be when I read something, or saw something that I knew it was real. Someone created it for me to experience. It was a form of connection. But now I'm no longer certain. Unless I really know the source, have met them in person, or seen them talk I just don't know if what I'm trying to connect with is real.
taffydavid 3mo ago
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.
- arcticfox 3mo ago
  I just heard it for the first time but why is that ironic? Isn't the point about feeling and not age?
  - taffydavid 3mo ago
    I think it's ironic because the old man is schooling the kid, but the kid in that scene literally wrote the words for the old man. Maybe irony is too strong, but it's amusing at least
  - joenot443 3mo ago
    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.
- pdpi 3mo ago
  It makes perfect sense — what separates Will from Ben and Matt is that they’re willing to acknowledge the difference exists. They’re willing to say “we have this, but we don’t have that”.
zacksiri 3mo ago
I watched this movie recently, and the same thought crossed my mind. I was going to write a blog post about it, but was too afraid to read the responses. I'm glad you did. If I meet you I'd buy you a cup of coffee, we'd talk and we'd become friends.
causality0 3mo ago
Doesn't this argument equally apply to any art humans create that isn't related to their lived experiences? Melville was never a whaler. Picasso didn't witness the bombing of Guernica. Stephen Crane wasn't a veteran. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte wrote their books with no experience of a romantic relationship. Are all these works "slop"?
lilerjee 3mo ago
Its meaning is similar to my blog about what AI is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641141 Intelligence is like your own practice or experiences in the real world. Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies.
chasd00 3mo ago
A better way to view this is Robin Williams character is the LLM and Matt Damon’s character is every holier than thou software developer. If writing code defines you to the point that a tool (written by other devs mind you) is causing an existential crisis then a better movie to watch and think about is Fight Club. To quote Q from Star Trek “frankly, you’re just not that important”.
low_tech_love 3mo ago
That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI. So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt? So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?
synthsec 3mo ago
What I find particularly sad is that this blog post contains many writing tells associated with AI editing and augmentation. So does the author themselves not care about the “art” of their own blogs posts?
- sebastiennight 3mo ago
  We have come full circle now that we're getting tricked by an appeal to authority into watching a 5-minute movie clip as the basis for an empty AI-written slop blog article about how AI can't empathize with humans.
- froggy 3mo ago
  Not sure what “tells” you’re talking about. They have a “Made with Human Intelligence” badge at bottom of the post. Are you calling them liars? If so, what do you have to gain by trying to discredit them? Are you heavily invested in AI, or is there something else motivating you? The overall message from the post is good, and I find the attacks on it in these comments highly unusual.
handfuloflight 3mo ago
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.
ghusto 3mo ago
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.
- mrugge 3mo ago
  Will, is that you?
jacobriers 3mo ago
If your reverse the roles and Robin Williams as an actor is ChatGPT pretending to have experienced life, you could argue his performance has value to us even though it's fake.
jackkora 3mo ago
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.

405 points by herbertl 3mo ago

> 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.

mingus88 3mo ago
> Does anyone really take AI that seriously? Surely you have heard the stories of people using LLMs as girlfriends, therapists and drug trip guides right? Sometimes with fatal results? Yes, people are taking LLMs very seriously.
fn-mote 3mo ago
>> This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter. > Does anyone really take AI that seriously? Young people are having a very hard time developing a feeling of competence because LLMs produce better work than beginners in many fields. Without experience as a beginner, it is hard to progress to a level where you don’t believe in the magic anymore.
- sublinear 3mo ago
  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.
  - jplusequalt 3mo ago
    >Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem) Yes they are. Read some of the comments on this website and you'll hear that many people no longer write or read their own fucking code.
    - sublinear 3mo ago
      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?
- apsurd 3mo ago
  llms don’t produce anything on their own. 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.

deleted 3mo ago

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esafak 3mo ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears_in_rain_monologue

manytimesaway 3mo ago
Replicants are not robots, and are arguably not AI. LLMs aren't AI either, but once the bullshit's out of the bag...
- teaearlgraycold 3mo ago
  AI can be anything from depth first search to superhuman intelligence on a chip. I like to refer to it as automated statistics.
  - yggy 3mo ago
    Guessing machine
jimbokun 3mo ago
You know the actor playing the part of the robot was a human being…right?
- NopIdoN 3mo ago
  according to him
  - bryanrasmussen 3mo ago
    wait, he has officially made a statement?

aaron695 3mo ago

[dead]

jimbokun 3mo ago

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.

SoftTalker 3mo ago
It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.
- mingus88 3mo ago
  And an LLM is just generating a token stream from a set of model weights
  - jiggawatts 3mo ago
    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!
    - genxy 3mo ago
      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".

sourdecor 3mo ago

'Slop' getting better every nanosecond is part of the singularity curve too.

timacles 3mo ago
define better slop will never have substance
- IshKebab 3mo ago
  Never? Never is a long time. There are already plenty of things AI can do that people confidently said would never happen. I'm guessing you're one of the "it can't think" crowd?
- Brian_K_White 3mo ago
  more effective
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Slop will never be high art but it will absolutely be good enough for 90+% of people. Marvel movies are slop, and they are the most successful thing ever made.

hackthemack 3mo ago

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.

altmanaltman 3mo ago

[flagged]

thisoneisreal 3mo ago
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.
- altmanaltman 3mo ago
  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.

65 3mo ago

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.

deleted 3mo ago
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zerobees 3mo ago
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.
Barrin92 3mo ago
>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.
- drdaeman 3mo ago
  > luxury of an emotion without paying for it 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.

owenversteeg 3mo ago

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 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.

randallsquared 3mo ago

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.

hack1312 3mo ago

I love Cambridge

vardalab 3mo ago
Scene is in Boston Public Garden
- hack1312 3mo ago
  Yes but Harvard, where the majority of the movie takes place, is in Cambridge. And that’s where I lived (well, Somerville). The Public Garden is obv beautiful as well, that whole area of downtown is great.

bpalmerau 3mo ago

"... 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 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. 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-up/#invisible-hand 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-bubble-strike-at-its-roots/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...

w10-1 3mo ago

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).

randallsquared 3mo ago

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

trescenzi 3mo ago
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.
jiqiren 3mo ago
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.
- OrsonSmelles 3mo ago
  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.

zelon88 3mo ago

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.

IAmGraydon 3mo ago
A bizarre post, for certain. You’re saying you believe LLMs have emotions? What are you basing that on?
- zelon88 3mo ago
  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.
  - IAmGraydon 3mo ago
    I see.
    - 3mo ago

yashthakker 3mo ago

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klodolph 3mo ago

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.

yohannparis 3mo ago
Maybe because it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Afleck, which at the time they were in their 20's
- klodolph 3mo ago
  Yes, that’s what I was getting at. Matt Damon didn’t have the kind of life experiences to write a good version of that speech, so we got the version in the movie, which sucks.

falcor84 3mo ago

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.

Springtime 3mo ago
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.
- falcor84 3mo ago
  Are you referring to this part? > 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".

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago

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.

jsmo 3mo ago

Feels like author nim is trying to calm his own anxiety

MathMonkeyMan 3mo ago

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.

moezd 3mo ago

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 3mo ago

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."

anal_reactor 3mo ago

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deleted 3mo ago

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fithisux 3mo ago

Very good article. 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. Humanity is broken beyond repair.

ai-may-i 3mo ago

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librasteve 3mo ago

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

moffkalast 3mo ago
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.
- tmtvl 3mo ago
  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.
e40 3mo ago
Not going to downvote you, but you missed the point of Roy Batty and his speech. Roy’s mind was indistinguishable from humans, and that’s why he was feared by humans and was given an artificially short lifespan. And the quote you referenced proves his humanity.

chr15m 3mo ago

The map is not the territory.

Garlef 3mo ago

I like it; 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!)

villgax 3mo ago

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.

arjie 3mo ago

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.

rib3ye 3mo ago

Is this clip from Good Will Hunting really a rip on vibe coding? It seems more akin to a linux kernel eng talking down to a react developer.

CuriousSkeptic 3mo ago
You can substitute Robin Williams with Peter Naur, and the speech with his “Programming as Theory Building” essay, and that is more or less what you’ll get

ricardobayes 3mo ago

I think we are entering an era where everything is meaningless, shallow and profit-driven. Even art of all things will fade. Sure we'll figure out cancer and live till 110 but at what cost?

negergreger 3mo ago

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globular-toast 3mo ago

I think this point about experience does get at something with AI slop. But there's at least another couple of things I would add: AI has no taste, nor does it have skin in the game. I only use LLMs to generate code, but I'm sure it's the same for everything else. Taste is a difficult thing to pin down, but you know it when you see it. LLMs can regurgitate things it's seen that had good taste, but every now and then it will produce something with no taste. This shows that it, fundamentally, does not understand the difference. The more important thing, though, is skin in the game. Quite simply, it does not care. It can't care. Having no taste is a big part of that, but it also won't have to deal with the consequences of its actions. People are quick to say this stuff is intelligent, but it's easy to sound intelligent when that's all you do. People have to actually be intelligent because they are going to feel the results of their actions later.

izucken 3mo ago

The levels of irony here are peaking. - slop article that itself feels AI generated; - using a movie quote, like, from an actor and script and stuff; - a quote that itself is super smug and on the nose; - saying something so self evident even an AI wouldn't assume; - to fight the powah of llm's overtaking the slop article field; An LLM itself doesn't personally come to you to ruin you, and pretend that it is superior to you or knows you. Unless, it is wired to do that. Unless it is used by some other unique snowflake to ruin. Freaking deepseek will always remind you that it's a box without a lived experience or feelings. If your box assumes a personhood, look not at it, but at the guy who sells it.

ChrisMarshallNY 3mo ago

Somehow, I was reminded of this Mark Twain quote: > "War talk by men who have been in a war is always interesting; whereas moon talk by a poet who has not been in the moon is likely to be dull."

piokoch 3mo ago

One of the striking things about LLM-s is verbosity. A junior guy had to do some task and create docs how (a rather simple) change needs to be done. He produced, using Copilot (all those hyphens, additional lines between paragraphs, etc.) , a long dissertation that included some rather poor analogies and that could have been summarized in 5 sentences. Yet I had to go through that writing. Same with the code. Generate Apache Kafka listener using Spring Kafka. Here you go, my human boss, the code is ready. The code is ready, but, somehow some outdated tutorial or Stackoverflow answer must have kicked in, hence it produced some totally unnecessary factory of factories that Java loves so much, but could be replaced with a few lines in the properties file. But, when notified, Copilot kindly agreed that that factory is not really need and I am right.

hexasquid 3mo ago

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?

forgotusername6 3mo ago
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.
- LogicFailsMe 3mo ago
  TBF humans will never have the experience of what it's like to be an AI by those rules either. The confident assertions about the nature of consciousness so many make despite still having no real idea what it is astound me. But personally, I'm more optimistic. I'll bet it's more likely the AIs figure out consciousness down the road and explain it to us than the other way around. The limit to their intelligence seems effectively unbounded so far and they're starting to creep past us here and there. The AIs will have the advantage of being able to observe consciousness from the outside that we lack.
- grantcas 3mo ago
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YurgenJurgensen 3mo ago
Just another couple of years and a few more trillion, and the whole world’s semiconductor and data output and it’ll be useful. Trust me bro.

tim333 3mo ago

I'm not sure it's actually a great response to AI slop. The main problem with it is it isn't very good.

everyone 3mo ago

I mean I defo wouldn't categorize ChatGPT as "smart and capable and good" at anything.

aorth 3mo ago

In season 1 episode 2 of The Audacity JoAnne tells Duncan that "information is not insight" and that's a similar argument to this.

B1FF_PSUVM 3mo ago

Toss P.K. Dick's "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" at that essay. (Hey, sixty years of publication. And it may not even be the first "implanted memories" story around, googles give an 1892 precursor.)

bloomingeek 3mo ago

I think most posters are missing the point. They're over thinking the scene. Ai can never feel anything. Info isn't the same as knowledge, knowledge isn't the same as wisdom. We humans are too complex to be answered by the infinite knowledge of Ai. IF we care about the possible harm it can be to humans, we can then properly deal with the use of Ai. It's a wonderful tool for some things, however, we tend to over do everything when it comes to tech. Humans matter, but can we trust corporations or governments to protect us from Ai?

dtj1123 3mo ago

Plato gave a better response with his allegory of the cave: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.

nullc 3mo ago
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!
- dtj1123 3mo ago
  I've read this through a few times and I'm afraid I can't understand how this relates to my comment.
  - nullc 3mo ago
    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.

trollbridge 3mo ago

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

photon_lines 3mo ago
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 humans can connect with and understand.
- trollbridge 3mo ago
  Yeah. I personally think human emotions are not so complex that a machine can’t analyse them and deduce correct conclusions.

KolmogorovComp 3mo ago

The reality is that the extremely large majority of people (especially in developed countries), have not experienced anything close to Robin William's character, nor do they have the slightest portion of Damon's character knowledge. So it's a weak argument against LLM. But the extract is just an example for the author, whose thinking really boils down to "human have something that machine will never replace". It's fine if you believe in supernatural force, but otherwise, it's just another jest of human arrogance. That's not to say transformer architecture will be enough to completely outcompete humans, I have the honesty to say I don't know.

netcan 3mo ago

To me this feels like analogue for sentience, consciousness & intelligence. Our attempts at dissecting the mind. Which is the "true" us? Knowledge? Wisdom? The humanity of our experience? It's fascinating that technology brings up such questions. But the slop question... I think the slop question is different. LLMs are new. But, slop is a product of media as it happened to exist when LLMs showed up. > an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars. High velocity, low effort, algo-driven viral spam... that was already there when AI entered the room. It was already sloppy. It was already a centerpiece of our politics, info-space, entertainment. The business models already existed. The audience was already primed. TV news was already slop. Reddit, twitter and whatnot were already slop. Democratization of media turned out to be a race to slop. Even this "storytelling space" was pretty worked over. In the early days of online video TED created a very successful method for "storytelling coaching." A way to take any person with any kind of experience and make them into a story. One that resonates. At first it was great. Over time, it became used up. Slop. Formats and methods milked for everything they're worth.

Verdex 3mo ago
I created a personal philosophy of code awfulness because back in 2012 I worked in a code base that was so bad it completely baffled all my attempts to categorize it. This and thus is why code is bad. Oh wait a second. They're doing something terrible that's completely orthogonal to the sum total of awfulness encounter so far. The best (worst?) one was a demonstration mode that the product had. Functions would call functions, one after the other until like 50 calls deep you would wind up where you started. Why didn't the stack blow up? Because they would at seemingly random launch a new thread and abandon the existing stack. This was the main loop. Simply describing the mess was enough to convince the client to let us rewrite the feature wholesale. Anyway the point is the same as yours. Slop code is a thing long before our current scenario.
- fzzzy 3mo ago
  Continuation passing style by spawning a new thread with the continuation function. Wow. I remember trying to wrap my head around how Erlang implemented infinite loops with recursion (tail recursion with a trampoline I guess?) but never would have guessed it could be done in C by spawning a thread.

YeGoblynQueenne 3mo ago

I concede that Robin Williams was a good actor and a real professional. It takes one (of each) to deliver such a dumb monologue with grace and conviction, without stumbling over the inane blandness of the material. He carries it through like the pro he clearly was. Whoever wrote that thing though should burn in writer's hell, boiled forever in stale ink and old IBM keyboards. Five minutes of an older man god-moding a younger man and we have to suspend disbelief for the entire thing: oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. Every. Single. Thing. He got nothing wrong. Not one thing. He goes on about the Capela Sistina' ssmell and then he switches to women and I'm "oh no he's gonna tell him 'you don't know what a woman tastes like'" or something weird and creepy like that. But, no, the kid's had sex! Already at his age? I read the LotR at high school! And then he's like "you don't know what it's like to wake up next to one woman being perfectly happy"... wait, what? How would you even know something like that? Have you had sex as a young man? And you weren't happy afterwards? Maybe there's something wrong with you then, not the kid? Honestly, that's nothing but some kind of elder dude fantasy, or other. It could have been tolerable if it lasted for two minutes, maybe two and a half, but it goes on for far too long.

GTP 3mo ago
> oh yes, that's perfectly believable, the older man has seen right through the young man's soul and he knows everything the young man thinks and feels. He says exactly the opposite: that he can't know about the guy just because he read Oliver Twist and would be fascinated to hear about him, about the real person the guy intimately is.
rchaud 3mo ago
How can it be an elder dude fantasy when it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck when they were in college? Robin Williams' character isn't pwning anyone. He's a therapist trying to get through to a patient who's completely walled up and trying to deflect by by analyzing the therapists' painting in his office to comment on his wife's passing. When I think about elder dude fantasizing about pwning the rascal youth, I think of those self-written scenes of a boomer/early GenX actor asking for "black coffee", then delivering a diatribe to the Gen Z minimum wage worker who's contractually obligated to try to upsell them on the higher-priced and infuriatingly named mixed coffee beverages.

treespace8 3mo ago

I find at the heart of all this AI slop is a deep sadness at the loss of connection. It used to be when I read something, or saw something that I knew it was real. Someone created it for me to experience. It was a form of connection. But now I'm no longer certain. Unless I really know the source, have met them in person, or seen them talk I just don't know if what I'm trying to connect with is real.

taffydavid 3mo ago

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.

arcticfox 3mo ago
I just heard it for the first time but why is that ironic? Isn't the point about feeling and not age?
- taffydavid 3mo ago
  I think it's ironic because the old man is schooling the kid, but the kid in that scene literally wrote the words for the old man. Maybe irony is too strong, but it's amusing at least
- joenot443 3mo ago
  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.
pdpi 3mo ago
It makes perfect sense — what separates Will from Ben and Matt is that they’re willing to acknowledge the difference exists. They’re willing to say “we have this, but we don’t have that”.

zacksiri 3mo ago

I watched this movie recently, and the same thought crossed my mind. I was going to write a blog post about it, but was too afraid to read the responses. I'm glad you did. If I meet you I'd buy you a cup of coffee, we'd talk and we'd become friends.

causality0 3mo ago

Doesn't this argument equally apply to any art humans create that isn't related to their lived experiences? Melville was never a whaler. Picasso didn't witness the bombing of Guernica. Stephen Crane wasn't a veteran. Jane Austen and Emily Bronte wrote their books with no experience of a romantic relationship. Are all these works "slop"?

lilerjee 3mo ago

Its meaning is similar to my blog about what AI is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641141 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48641141 Intelligence is like your own practice or experiences in the real world. Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies.

chasd00 3mo ago

A better way to view this is Robin Williams character is the LLM and Matt Damon’s character is every holier than thou software developer. If writing code defines you to the point that a tool (written by other devs mind you) is causing an existential crisis then a better movie to watch and think about is Fight Club. To quote Q from Star Trek “frankly, you’re just not that important”.

low_tech_love 3mo ago

That’s a great scene, with great writing, and a nice article written about it, but we’ve all been there. Anyone with a couple of synapses has thought “AI is not like humans”. To realize that is not the issue; the issue is: how do you deal with the fact that we now live a world where you cannot actually tell the difference anymore? The awful truth is that nowadays AI could have written that dialogue, or something even “better”. If that movie had come out last month, I’d probably dismiss it as potentially AI. So how do we maintain the parts of our lives as a group that rely on the “soul”? Imagine you meet your soulmate, and they write the most beautiful love letter you ever read. But, the language is a bit too fancy, and they made less mistakes than usual. Hell, you’re quite sure they don’t even know exactly what a couple of those words even mean. So how do you deal with that? Or even worse, suppose the writing is exactly as they would have written it. How do you deal with the doubt? So what happens to the “human soul” if our output is identical to a robot? If humans are black boxes, but we replicate the box perfectly, the how will the contents of the box survive? And how do we find them?

synthsec 3mo ago

What I find particularly sad is that this blog post contains many writing tells associated with AI editing and augmentation. So does the author themselves not care about the “art” of their own blogs posts?

sebastiennight 3mo ago
We have come full circle now that we're getting tricked by an appeal to authority into watching a 5-minute movie clip as the basis for an empty AI-written slop blog article about how AI can't empathize with humans.
froggy 3mo ago
Not sure what “tells” you’re talking about. They have a “Made with Human Intelligence” badge at bottom of the post. Are you calling them liars? If so, what do you have to gain by trying to discredit them? Are you heavily invested in AI, or is there something else motivating you? The overall message from the post is good, and I find the attacks on it in these comments highly unusual.

handfuloflight 3mo ago

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.

ghusto 3mo ago

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.

mrugge 3mo ago
Will, is that you?

jacobriers 3mo ago

If your reverse the roles and Robin Williams as an actor is ChatGPT pretending to have experienced life, you could argue his performance has value to us even though it's fake.

jackkora 3mo ago

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.