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 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.

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’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

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.

> "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."

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.

It seems more akin to a linux kernel eng talking down to a react developer.

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.

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.

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.

Intelligence is like your own practice or experiences in the real world.

Current AI is like the film company producing TV series or movies.

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.

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).

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.

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.

"More, and more, and more, and more, More of less than ever before, Just too much more for your mind to absorb."

> 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.

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'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

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!)

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?

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?

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.

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.

"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-...

(Hey, sixty years of publication. And it may not even be the first "implanted memories" story around, googles give an 1892 precursor.)

- 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.