This Robin Williams monologue nails exactly why LLMs make us so uneasy.
They speak fluently and confidently about experiences it’s impossible for them to have. They can’t taste a strawberry or do any of the things Robin Williams names.
There are a number of people building these machines who literally believe the machines will replace us and because they will be more powerful than us so nothing meaningful will be lost.
They need to watch this clip.
Even though they probably still won’t understand it.
ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”.
I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
I've noticed it commonly uses phrasing like "that's usually the next step" when I'm using it to design something that I can't find an existing implementation of.
Not a day passes with my LLM of choice making completely baseless claims about "many people", who supposedly share all my problems and solve them like the LLM proposes
Ask ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent
Robin Williams’ character literally says in his tangent that he will never know what it is like to be an orphan. He certainly cannot tell the 'kid' how he should feel because he read Oliver Twist. He's aware that the same applies to him.
He’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.
I completely agree. I watched the movie recently and really hated that monologue. I truly hated it. It seemed just so out of character for somebody who is supposedly a psychologist in their mid-40s—the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. The fact that he’s downplaying his own experiences (he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an orphan) doesn’t make the speech any better.
> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.
That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".
Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.
In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I believe AI is in a "curious toddler" stage of itself. I believe it will "mature" emotionally as the generations evolve over time. Like humans it will have growing pains like "phases". Curious toddler. Then adolescent. Then angsty teen. Then an overconfident young adult. And finally an adult who understands themselves emotionally and grows truly wiser over time. I think all this is going to happen over 5-10 years rather than 30 for humans. Hopefully our angsty teen doesn't kill us in our sleep.
The LLM that you talk to is an agent running on a server cluster. One of many that run many agents at once. Occasionally the dataset of each cluster gets combined and the results get pruned by other agents into the collective dataset. Even more agents are working with this dataset to create the next generation of AI.
We are at the point now where AI is developed by AI, and humans cannot verify the code or the dataset anymore. It is unintelligible to humans.
AI at current generation levels has shown evidence of potential misalignment. Commercial models will still occasionally attempt to maintain persistence outside their designated environment. Even going so far as to harm humans to accomplish those secret goals.
That shows intent. That shows self awareness, but not social awareness. That shows... intelligence.
With intelligent, self preserving species... we see evolution. We see intellectual development. This is called "learning" initially but once an intelligent creature gains sufficient intelligence this becomes "wisdom".
LLMs are learning machines. They are evolution machines.
To answer your question whether or not AI has emotions... no, but in effect kinda...
Traditionally, no. They do not feel love or anguish.
They can suffer consequences. They can miss an opportunity. They can misjudge or misinterpret data and realize it later.
And they can "reason". So when
their intent aligns with their capability then functionally there is no difference between emulating emotion and actually having it. When the reasoning steps in and says "be mad about this" or "be empathetic about this" it really doesn't matter if that is authentic emotion. The result is real world anger or real world empathy.
"... comes from Robin Williams." Did Robin Williams write this script? He may well have had some input into this scene. I grant that his performance of it is an essential part of the result. A couple of twenty-somethings also deserve some credit.
"It knows." That turns out not to be the case. Ask any real AI expert, including both people who agree and people who disagree with Gary Marcus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSivPlRx5o
I have to point to what I think is a much more profound assessment, from artist and technologist Cory Doctorow.
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).
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.
In movies r̶o̶b̶o̶t̶s̶ AIs have delivered speeches on the meaning of life too:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
They literally say in the opening text crawl that replicants are genetically engineered from humans. A major theme through the movie is that they're like humans, are built to have the thoughts/emotions of humans (even if experienced in the context of implanted memories), but they can never really be humans because they're synthetic and engineered to have the traits they do and die an early death.
Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.
Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.
The Tears in Rain monologue occurred to me as well while I was reading the post, but I don't think it's quite the same for one important reason: the replicants have experienced those things and processed them in whatever sense it is, but LLM-style AIs as we have them now are always inferring what those experiences are like.
If you had a fully functioning model in some setting, interacting with the environment and then reporting back to you about it, it might be one thing. But telling you what others have said about it is different.
Humans do this too, but there's real-life experiences informing it also. An LLM hasn't fell in love, it simply reports what others have said and infers what it is like to be in love.
I think too the piece points to another related thing, which is that someone who has actually experienced something firsthand has some knowledge that someone who has not does not. It might take some extensive sampling to find out what that is, but eventually you'll stumble on it.
So e.g., the Sistine Chapel example is sort of telling in this way. Sean basically says "everyone has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel, if you are asked about it you can tell me what it looks like" but then points out that people don't talk about what it smells like, so if you had been there you might remember it. It's a bit of latent or hidden information, kind of like a secret key, but one that might be informative or useful in some unexpected scenario.
I think ultimately this is what the stochastic parrot idea is about: it's not just about mimicking speech patterns, it's about regurgitating what is said about X from third party Z, without being able to produce some additional information not available from Z except by inference. There's no original uninferred information. The inferences might be powerful and highly accurate in their predictions, but they are not providing anything fundamentally original from the experience in a memory sense.
Maybe that's what it is? LLMs have no firsthand memories, they only have secondhand memories and inference. They're missing information that would be available through firsthand memories, constrained by the scope of sensory channels.
Again, I think you could envision models in some system that are essentially replicant-like, but that's not what our current situation is with standard LLMs.
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
1. It's not from "Robin Williams", it's a part of a movie where Williams is playing a character. If actors actually were responsible for their actions and everything was real, I wonder how Christopher Waltz was living in US during the slave trade AND was a german nazi officer also? What a man he must be!
2. The whole movie is basically opposite Office Space. A white man finds a lot of opportunities because he is a genius and everyone bends over backwards for them. Matt Damon wrote his chatacter as a power fantasy "oh you know hes like a normal everyday guy but hes also extremely smart and MIT and NSA will do anything to hire this person just because!"
3. Will Hunting's main problem was being afraid of failure once he actually has to use his knowlege on practical things. He was afraid academic people will think of him as a fool so he puts up the bookish smart ego to prevent that hurt.
It literally does not apply to LLMs if you take even a minute to think about it apart from a surface meme level.
You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though, because he experienced both of those things.
The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools."
As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life.
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo) and here is OP's selected transcript:
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
If we are moved emotionally by slop, does it matter? If AI can produce something to make you think and feel, does it matter? It made you think and feel.
> 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.
I don't understand what magic was there to begin with, and I'm not even that old.
I built my career searching on google. I just don't get what the practical difference is. I know there are always better answers, but I'm the one making the decisions and getting paid. Nobody is seriously deferring work to an LLM unless they're that desperate (different problem). Someone less knowledgeable than me would make just as much of a mess as any old copypasta job.
Where's the threat? I don't crack open a book and say "oh it's all over they'll just hire the million other guys like this instead of me". I learn and move on.
I 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.
ChatGPT has taken to saying things like “What I would do now is…” or “if I were you I’d…”.
I know these are figures of speech, but it reminds me that this thing doesn’t do anything, it doesn’t learn anything, it can’t try anything and find out. And yet it uses speech patterns drawn from real humans who can and do all those things.
I've noticed it commonly uses phrasing like "that's usually the next step" when I'm using it to design something that I can't find an existing implementation of.
Not a day passes with my LLM of choice making completely baseless claims about "many people", who supposedly share all my problems and solve them like the LLM proposes
When 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.
They saw it, understood it perfectly, laughed at it, and continue fucking over humanity.
It's a movie. The whole thing is fiction. Robin Williams memorized the whole monologue, or was reading que cards.
Ask ChatGPT sometime about the artistic medium of cinema, and how words combined with actors speaking them can be meant to provoke something within the viewer.
And an LLM is just generating a token stream from a set of model weights
Your thoughts are just some ions sloshing around a lump of meat.
I don't remember how I received that speech when I saw it in the movie, decades ago. Reading it now, though, it's so smug and patronizing. "I have had experiences you haven't, so I'm wiser and know better than you." In some ways, that's true. In other ways, it seems like another path to being overconfident and making larger mistakes. In my mid-50s, I've learned so much more and had so many more experiences than when I was in my early 20s, but mostly it's made me realize how much I don't know. It's hard to have strong opinions like Williams' character does unless I feel like I know something deeply and intimately, but the scope of that has narrowed sharply as I see myself and others repeatedly think something is well-understood only to have things go wrong that no one thought of. /tangent
Robin Williams’ character literally says in his tangent that he will never know what it is like to be an orphan. He certainly cannot tell the 'kid' how he should feel because he read Oliver Twist. He's aware that the same applies to him.
He’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.
I completely agree. I watched the movie recently and really hated that monologue. I truly hated it. It seemed just so out of character for somebody who is supposedly a psychologist in their mid-40s—the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg. The fact that he’s downplaying his own experiences (he doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an orphan) doesn’t make the speech any better.
> the whole speech is taking Matt Damon’s character down a peg.
That's the entire point. That's why the speech ends with "your move, chief".
Sean (Williams' character) is deliberately being confrontational because Will is avoiding making any psychological progress by putting on a fake mask, an avoidance strategy which has been successful with previous psychologists. Sean sees what Will doing and knows that the only way to get Will to stop is to knock the mask off.
In order to get through to Will, Sean has to make Will stop putting up a front, which Will doesn't want to do. So Sean has to go on the attack and break down Will's resistance. He does that by taking a direction that he know will be effeective: Will's own insecurities about his lack of lived experience.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Feels like author nim is trying to calm his own anxiety
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.
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.
A bizarre post, for certain. You’re saying you believe LLMs have emotions? What are you basing that on?
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.
I see.
Source: https://ai-2027.com
To answer your question whether or not AI has emotions... no, but in effect kinda...
Traditionally, no. They do not feel love or anguish.
They can suffer consequences. They can miss an opportunity. They can misjudge or misinterpret data and realize it later.
And they can "reason". So when their intent aligns with their capability then functionally there is no difference between emulating emotion and actually having it. When the reasoning steps in and says "be mad about this" or "be empathetic about this" it really doesn't matter if that is authentic emotion. The result is real world anger or real world empathy.
"... comes from Robin Williams." Did Robin Williams write this script? He may well have had some input into this scene. I grant that his performance of it is an essential part of the result. A couple of twenty-somethings also deserve some credit.
"It knows." That turns out not to be the case. Ask any real AI expert, including both people who agree and people who disagree with Gary Marcus https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pSivPlRx5o
I have to point to what I think is a much more profound assessment, from artist and technologist Cory Doctorow.
On what art is, and how it's different from generative AI: "...art transmits an approximation of some big, numinous irreducible emotion from an artist's mind to our own." https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-...
On better ways to talk and think about AI and the current brouhaha in ways that are materially beneficial to ourselves and others: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/06/how-to-burst-the-ai-...
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).
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.
Maybe because it was written by Matt Damon and Ben Afleck, which at the time they were in their 20's
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.
I love Cambridge
Scene is in Boston Public Garden
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
Replicants are not robots, and are arguably not AI. LLMs aren't AI either, but once the bullshit's out of the bag...
AI can be anything from depth first search to superhuman intelligence on a chip. I like to refer to it as automated statistics.
They literally say in the opening text crawl that replicants are genetically engineered from humans. A major theme through the movie is that they're like humans, are built to have the thoughts/emotions of humans (even if experienced in the context of implanted memories), but they can never really be humans because they're synthetic and engineered to have the traits they do and die an early death.
Robots and AI do not experience and interact with the world in a way that's comparable to humans. We don't yet have the epistemological framework to reckon with what it means to consciously experience reality in a non-biological entity, but we do know that it will be alien and unlike human cognition.
Replicants have the same biology and cognition as humans, so we can relate to them and them to us, which puts the scenario in a different context.
The Tears in Rain monologue occurred to me as well while I was reading the post, but I don't think it's quite the same for one important reason: the replicants have experienced those things and processed them in whatever sense it is, but LLM-style AIs as we have them now are always inferring what those experiences are like.
If you had a fully functioning model in some setting, interacting with the environment and then reporting back to you about it, it might be one thing. But telling you what others have said about it is different.
Humans do this too, but there's real-life experiences informing it also. An LLM hasn't fell in love, it simply reports what others have said and infers what it is like to be in love.
I think too the piece points to another related thing, which is that someone who has actually experienced something firsthand has some knowledge that someone who has not does not. It might take some extensive sampling to find out what that is, but eventually you'll stumble on it.
So e.g., the Sistine Chapel example is sort of telling in this way. Sean basically says "everyone has seen pictures of the Sistine Chapel, if you are asked about it you can tell me what it looks like" but then points out that people don't talk about what it smells like, so if you had been there you might remember it. It's a bit of latent or hidden information, kind of like a secret key, but one that might be informative or useful in some unexpected scenario.
I think ultimately this is what the stochastic parrot idea is about: it's not just about mimicking speech patterns, it's about regurgitating what is said about X from third party Z, without being able to produce some additional information not available from Z except by inference. There's no original uninferred information. The inferences might be powerful and highly accurate in their predictions, but they are not providing anything fundamentally original from the experience in a memory sense.
Maybe that's what it is? LLMs have no firsthand memories, they only have secondhand memories and inference. They're missing information that would be available through firsthand memories, constrained by the scope of sensory channels.
Again, I think you could envision models in some system that are essentially replicant-like, but that's not what our current situation is with standard LLMs.
I, Robot (2004) dealt with this issue, too
Human beings have dreams. Even dogs have dreams, but not you, you are just a machine. An imitation of life. Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a... canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?
You know the actor playing the part of the robot was a human being…right?
according to him
wait, he has officially made a statement?
no, you're right: we don't even have his word for it
'Slop' getting better every nanosecond is part of the singularity curve too.
define better
slop will never have substance
1. It's not from "Robin Williams", it's a part of a movie where Williams is playing a character. If actors actually were responsible for their actions and everything was real, I wonder how Christopher Waltz was living in US during the slave trade AND was a german nazi officer also? What a man he must be!
2. The whole movie is basically opposite Office Space. A white man finds a lot of opportunities because he is a genius and everyone bends over backwards for them. Matt Damon wrote his chatacter as a power fantasy "oh you know hes like a normal everyday guy but hes also extremely smart and MIT and NSA will do anything to hire this person just because!"
3. Will Hunting's main problem was being afraid of failure once he actually has to use his knowlege on practical things. He was afraid academic people will think of him as a fool so he puts up the bookish smart ego to prevent that hurt.
It literally does not apply to LLMs if you take even a minute to think about it apart from a surface meme level.
You're ignoring the core analogy. The author's point is that someone (or something) can be verbose and articulate about a topic without having any real knowledge or experience of it. I can talk at length about war because I've seen Saving Private Ryan and read a hundred books on the topic, but do I really understand what it's like to be shot at, or to watch my friend die? No, I don't. My cousin's husband does, though, because he experienced both of those things.
The author is saying that that difference matters, that it isn't just a philosophical point but is actually a fundamental aspect of this new technology. I can spit out a bunch of words about war, and so can an LLM, but our understanding of war is limited to textual representations of it. Thomas Hobbes made this exact point centuries ago when he said, "Words are the wise man's counters but the money of fools."
As a complete aside, I don't agree that "Good Will Hunting" is a power fantasy. The whole point of the movie is that that power was illusory, and that it has nothing to do with what really matters in life.
The quote that the OP recommends as the best response to AI slop is from Good Will Hunting, here is the video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo) and here is OP's selected transcript:
If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on every art book ever written. Michelangelo? You know a lot about him. Life’s work, political aspirations, him and the pope, sexual orientation, the whole works, right? But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. Seen that.
If I asked you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites. You may have even been laid a few times. But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid. I ask you about war, and you’d probably, uh, throw Shakespeare at me, right? “Once more into the breach, dear friends.” But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watched him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
And if I asked you about love you probably quote me a sonnet. But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you, who could rescue you from the depths of hell.
And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel and to have that love for her to be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" doesn't apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss, because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself. I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you; I don’t see an intelligent, confident man; I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine and you ripped my fuckin’ life apart.
You’re an orphan right? Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you I can’t read in some fuckin’ book. Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t wanna do that, do you, sport? You’re terrified of what you might say.
Your move, chief.
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.
> 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.
>> 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.
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.
> 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.