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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.

Every time one watches a romantic scene in some film you know it's fake. Actors present a totally fake version of life. Every story has to be dramatised to get over the fact that it's largely boring to people who haven't lived it.

We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.

I know what it is to sit by my mother's bed with my brain burning itself out wanting her to be both miraculously cured and for her suffering to end at the same time.

I changed my daughter's nappies 1000s of times and no amount of poo mattered to me. I'd do it all again in a heartbeat. It doesn't make a film.

What these things do for a human that they don't do for a machine is to give one some empathy. I have a different outlook that I could not have obtained from reading a book. Life does not last forever and one must make it a joy and not waste it. Children are the great consolation against loss and, in my case, I fear death far less because it seems less important than failing my kid in some way.

My heart swells when I see a man being kind and showing love to his child - whether or not he is the best human in other ways I see that he has got the most critically important thing right.

The words can say this and even be inspiring but its difficult to really convey the feeling and one can be strongly tempted to ignore feelings. I don't envy people who are busy all the time and cannot take care of their kids no matter how rich they might be - in my view they're wasting something that's more important than trillions of dollars.

When Robin gave that performance, he was 47 years old. He'd been married twice. He'd been addicted to cocaine, and had partied with John Belushi the night he died from an overdose - which drove him to clean up his act.

Was some of his performance made up? Absolutely. Was he overreaching? Definitely. You can't know what a war zone is like until you've been in one. Words can't describe the strange normalcy that only gets dispelled (rather uneasily) when you leave the area, or how the rest of the world seems to lose some of its color and realism. You can't know what losing the love of your life feels like until it happens.

So yeah, some of his soliloquy lands hollow, but not all of it. And that's the nature of the entertainment industry. You work with what you've got, and it doesn't have to be perfect.

As a repackaged critique of treating LLMs like people and letting their works pass as deep (or letting LLMs lull you by behaving as such), it makes its point.

The speech isn't telling us what it's like to be in war or deal with cancer. It's telling us there's a difference between reading something and experiencing something. Whether it uses the real life experiences of Robin Williams or the fictional ones of his character is beside the point.
I think you’ve nailed why Robin Williams was a great actor. The therapist character absolutely has lived all of these experiences, albeit in fiction. The writing and delivery makes them real.

The article is saying a good, homemade breakfast is important. Robin Williams is a packet of store bought pancakes. ChatGPT, particularly in the sense that it is made from ground up and reconstituted humanity, is Soylent Green.

That observation doesn’t really prove that the argument fails, right? Just because analogies were used powerfully beyond the experience of a writer doesn’t let us conclude that AI has transcended or will soon transcend the value of all qualia (Mary’s room thought experiment).

And on the other hand we do have evidence to the contrary. AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this. It’s not capable of doing what a stand-up comedian does.

People will argue if and when these gaps can be closed. I think they can be in principle, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

You're talking about acting vs. lived experience. That doesn't invalidate the premise of the article, it actually strengthens it if you aren't overly pedantic in your read and interpretation.
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.

Well said! The lines from this movie are written in a way that make it easy for people to relate to this vague notion that 'experience' is different from 'learning'. But quantitatively speaking it's less clear what the difference really is. After all isn't experience simply another type of learning?
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.

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
Plato gave a better response with his 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.

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.
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

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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?
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.

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.
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."

Empowering speech for all beginners in all fields for sure. If you're struggling today because LLMs seem to eat your lunch in one way or another, it's a good feeling to remember this.

And yet, it's also a sign of how far we're going down the rabbit hole of trusting next token predictors to do everything for us. No amount of harness, allowing it to complete tasks by matching the templates it memorized, should convince anyone that LLMs have novel ideas, because it never will. Stop publishing your own framework's code on the Internet for six months and it will diverge, always producing legacy code. Stop writing your latest spicy analysis on international diplomacy and it will continue to sound like the hopeless optimists that we all once were last year.

LLMs are golden mean generators. They will continue to rehash what's genuinely useful out there while being far from inspirational. It will get your job done, probably, but won't shock and awe people, let alone experts.

I 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.
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.

Its meaning is similar to my blog about what AI is 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.

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.
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.)

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.

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.
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?
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.

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.

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?

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

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.
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.

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!)

Feels like author nim is trying to calm his own anxiety
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.

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.