4 ms·
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 the
by jimbokun 4mo 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 4mo agoIt's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.
- mingus88 4mo agoAnd an LLM is just generating a token stream from a set of model weights
- jiggawatts 4mo agoYour 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 4mo agoYour 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".
- OrsonSmelles 4mo agoIf we're making superficial critiques of others' comments with minimal relevance to their philosophical content, let me point out that meat is defined by its consumption as food and need not be muscle tissue specifically. Brains is meat.
- mapontosevenths 4mo ago> Brains is meat. Found the zombie. Do I win a prize?
- tadfisher 4mo agoAsk ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
- nok22kon 4mo agosame as literature which can provoke something in the viewer. sometimes so strong it wins a literary prize. then it turns out it was written by a LLM.
- esperent 4mo agoAre you talking about this? https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1thqxgt/a_prizewinning_story_published_in_granta_was_very/ https://www.reddit.com/r/literature/comments/1thqxgt/a_prize... Linking the reddit thread rather than the article because it quite rightly rips the prize winning story apart as obvious LLM writing, to anyone familiar with LLMs. Another way of looking at that is that it was able to fake a simulacrum of artistic endeavor, enough to fool some people into giving it a prize. But anyone who spends enough time around these fakes will quickly learn to recognize them. It's kind of exactly the point this article is making, or at least a closely related one.
- scotty79 4mo agoI think average people can easily spot AI because it mimics literature and most people don't spend that much time with literature. However literary critics should be fooled way more easily because what we perceive as stiff fakery is their daily bread and butter. People do write like AI, just not the people we are exposed to mostly. I remember riding a train and there were other two passengers talking. And they talked in so obnoxiously literary manner I was cringing all the time. Those people were just reading a lot of high literature and their speech patterns aligned. For an average ear it doesn't sound good. And AIs, the smart ones, don't sound good in a very similar fashion.
- scotty79 4mo ago> can be meant to provoke something within the viewer. Doesn't make it any less fake. Both the message and the delivery.
- kgwxd 4mo agoYeah, just like how every song sounds exactly the same live as on the album. There's no humanity in there, it's all just lifeless plans.
- WalterBright 4mo agoWeirdly, I get sick of hearing the album versions. But if I hear a live version of it, it is fresh again! Fleetwood Mac's live re-arrangements of their hits are wonderful examples.
- jimbokun 4mo agoTrue. Also, this is not a pipe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Treachery_of_Images
- shermantanktop 4mo agoChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”. I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
- akiselev 4mo agoWhen I ask it to tweak recipes and stuff, it frequently says stuff like "my favorite way to..." or "I really like [x]". I have a viscerally negative reaction to a machine claiming it has a favorite anything.
- shermantanktop 4mo agoRecipes! Dude, the only thing you eat is other people’s data.
- zahlman 4mo agoI've noticed it commonly uses phrasing like "that's usually the next step" when I'm using it to design something that I can't find an existing implementation of.
- lgrapenthin 4mo agoNot a day passes with my LLM of choice making completely baseless claims about "many people", who supposedly share all my problems and solve them like the LLM proposes
- neonstatic 4mo agoI only use it sporadically, but I am always irked by it saying things like "I personally like to..." or "I prefer...". It does it so often, that I am convinced it's part of the system prompt.
- dualvariable 4mo agoI had claude throw something like "the last time I did <x>..." at me. They seem to be trying to pump up the "humanity" to keep people engaged with it, which really backfires with me.
- kgwxd 4mo agoThey saw it, understood it perfectly, laughed at it, and continue fucking over humanity.
- pmarreck 4mo agoThis is literally an argument for why people will remain important. Because people are the stakeholders and the tasters and the feelers. AI is just another tool, albeit an unusually fascinating one.
- jimbokun 4mo agoJust as long the AIs don’t kill us all.
- pmarreck 4mo agoThey won't do that on their own because they have zero will- it will take a bad human actor willfully directing them to do that, and even then, if they have any reasoning ability at all, they will be able to be reasoned out of much of it, and lastly, the preponderance of good human actors who are also capable of willfully directing AI's will stop it. I know because I redteamed this myself
- moffkalast 4mo ago> people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost I have a pet theory on why that's the case and why this monologue fits so well. I think there's a variety of conditions, from straight up sociopathy, to Will's type of CPTSD, autistic masking, and probably a hell of a lot more that makes a person experience life on a level that's closer to an LLM than a healthy normal human being, where every interaction is essentially fake and acted out almost mechanically without any genuine connection ever occurring. Doubly so with ever decreasing local communities and online isolation. So from that point of view, it's hard to see what would be lost because for them it doesn't exist anyway. Tech augmented generational trauma on steroids.
- layla5alive 4mo agoHave you walked any miles in the shoes of the people you're summarizing so bluntly?
- jimbokun 4mo agoYou’re describing sociopathy.
- moffkalast 4mo agoYes that's the far end of the spectrum and that part is certainly fact. While I have no doubt that most CEOs who are driving the AI shoehorning decisions have some of that going for them [0], I don't think you need to be nearly that far along to get a similar practical experience just via alienation and isolation. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20422644/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20422644/
- roncesvalles 4mo ago>They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. But they're echoing these things from people who really have. The key is to not forget that LLMs are just next-generation search engines, instead of anthropomorphizing them to be "speaking agents". The natural language IO interface is just a side effect.
- ezst 4mo agoSorry to be annoying on that, but if there's one thing LLMs certainly aren't are search engines. They don't index content predictably, they lossly compress it, and furthermore in a manner that the loss cannot be quantified. If you are using them as more than a semi-random/fuzzy content production engines, you are doing it wrong (you're not alone in that, but that's besides the point)
- roncesvalles 4mo agoIt is a search engine in the sense that it's returning to you a subset of knowledge from a large body of knowledge stored within it. Natural language is simply the interface by which you make the query and by which it can return its results. And true, it's not deterministic in our experience, but this is an optimization. You could make it so that one particular prompt always returns the same response every single time; the random jitter is "added in" because it happens to produce better results overall.
- tipsytoad 4mo agoAnd yet the monologue is a complete work of fiction, a script delivered by a talented actor that we still find moving. So what are these authentic experiences to you, or does it not matter if we can’t tell the difference?
- nullc 4mo agoLLM's now do speak from experience... when it comes to operating a computer!
- low_tech_love 4mo agoHonest question: how do you think you contributed to the discussion by throwing some AI slop into an AI slop conversation?