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.
The article and your comment reminds me of one of my favourite songs which is a beautiful tribute to the ordinary - even dull -moments that make up life.
The song starts with a man in his deathbed whose life flashes before his eyes. As he is about to pass, he pleads with God to have one last chance to write down his ordinary life from start to end:
He writes his story down on the floor of his town, and when he is done he finally passes. The next day people find his writing and are enthralled with what he described, moved by the candid retelling of an ordinary life: I love the emphasised lines. People focus on the big moments - where you go, who you meet - yet what actually captivated the readers were the small moments that fill the gaps between everything else. That's where the real life is.The song is "A Story No-One Told" by Shad https://genius.com/Shad-a-story-no-one-told-lyrics
Not only romantic scenes, but any emotion. We are watching actors, any emotion on display is some measure of fake depending on how good the actor is.
That said, we all grew up watching movies, and one could argue their way of expressing emotions are imprinted onto us, so we all ‘emote’ as actors, and their emotional acting matches our true emotions.
You could expand this argument to our sexual realms, and it explains why young people imitate or expect it to be like porn. I wonder if also our romantic/sentimental emotional range tends toward the dramatic because of this effect.
In short: media shape how people feel and behave, more than the other way around.
If you actually act a realistic way then the (general) audience will completely miss it.
You have to drop your jaws, screech, and other over the top expressions so that everybody understands what emotion is being conveyed. A quick smirk when the villain deceives the main character will get missed; it needs to be a mischievous chuckle that clues everybody (but the main character) in on the fact somebody has been duped.
Good actors do bring their own emotion in. (At least some do)
They might not feel anything about their acting partner, but they feel about other persons and bring that emotion into the play, to make it more real.
Similar to how the best lies are those that contain as much as truth as possible.
I know that I cannot watch anything with mechanical acting that is obviously fake (probably the majority of productions).
Speaking of it, Asteroid City is a very good movie that explores this theme.
By the time Robin Williams filmed Good Will Hunting, he'd already dealt with his own drug issues and been struggling with sobriety. Hell, he visited John Belushi a few hours before Belushi overdosed.^
The article doesn't mention it, but the park scene is a response to the earlier office scene.
Office scene (aka painting scene): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBx0oy__EI
Park scene: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo
Full disclosure: outside of Casablanca, these two scenes are my favorite in cinema
One of the things that makes them so watchable is the little ticks that Robin Williams puts in (probably from his improv experience). Maybe he doesn't have the precise lived experience, but the man knows how to emote trauma.
In the office scene, there's a neat turn right before the painting moment where they're talking about weightlifting and Robin Williams' character gives a "Don't fuck with me, kid" warning response ("285. What do you bench?"). Of course, Matt Damon's character just zooms right past it.&
Similarly, the park scene has a great beat where after he says "You've never been out of Boston." he waits for Matt Damon to acknowledge what he said.+
^ https://web.archive.org/web/20140816025724/http://franksreel...
& Office scene, 2:03 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SuBx0oy__EI&t=2m3s
+ Park scene, 0:41 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=8GY3sO47YYo&t=41s
> We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely.
There’s a 2000s British TV show along these lines called “How TV Ruined Your Life” by Charlie Brooker, who later created Black Mirror.
> 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.
Don't say that. Adam Sandler might be reading these comments and...
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.
There are some really powerful things in Williams’s performance. You’re right about the nature of Hollywood—you work with what you got. But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
What I’m saying is that there’s a broader problem with stories in film and books where you can tell that the stories are written by somebody who leans too heavily on other stories and books. Movies are a kind of alchemy where writing, direction, and acting intersect so we can’t explain everything away as easily as we can with books, but I want to say that the monologue is weak in the script, and Robin Williams and Gus Van Sant manage to elevate it. The direction is absolutely stellar, the acting is on point, but I hate the actual words in the monologue.
> But Hollywood also eats its own tail. Filmmakers grow up watching films, and they tend to draw from other films, the same way that LLMs just kinda rearrange pieces from ingested text (which is an oversimplification, bear with me).
But this is how culture works I think. It's not the act of copying or rearranging or borrowing but how the material is being processed and what drives the change I think.
Culture is also an expression of real-world concerns and values held by those who create it. AI-vangelists will say “all art is copied” over and over again to justify generating their slop, but no matter how many times you ask them, you’ll never get an answer to the question “What is a single great work of art that did not represent a single real-world value of its creator?”
See also: various defining works of ancient Greek literature featuring the same characters, that are almost certainly fanfics of earlier works, like the Telegony.
Culture has been reworking existing culture since the idea of culture existed.
I was just reading interviews with Hayao Miyazaki around the time Princess Mononoke was released. He talked a lot about how all movies about feudal Japan or samurai were based on period costume plays and Akira Kurosawa movies. He had worked hard to research history to find what the period really looked like.
> Like, there’s something special about The Lord of the Rings that is not there in, say, Wizard’s First Rule. I don’t want to pick on or make fun of things too much, but Wizard’s First Rule seems to more rearrange existing ideas in the genre rather than drawing from something else.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong about Wizard's First Rule, but it's a funny example, because the entire rest of the series is noted for the forceful presentation of the author's specific message.
To rephrase your point in more technical terms: human minds can't be shaped by words the same way they can be shaped by experience (on-policy multimodal inputs). However, there's a possibility that this might not apply to machine learning.
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.
> AI is not capable of writing a movie script that resonates with people like this
I'm reminded of this interview with Casparov from 1989 (less than 10 years before he lost to Deep Blue):
>A machine will always remain a machine, that is to say a tool to help the player work and prepare. Never shall I be beaten by a machine! Never will a program be invented which surpasses human intelligence. And when I say intelligence, I also mean intuition and imagination. Can you see a machine writing a novel or poetry? Better still, can you imagine a machine conducting this interview instead of you? With me replying to its questions?[0]
Well, we have AI beating everyone at chess and conducting interviews...
[0] https://en.chessbase.com/post/edward-winters-che-exploration...
Qualia mualia. This is a fear argument that actually makes the danger more pertinent. Chalmers’ zombies, they are as benevolent and as mischievous as their qualia’d mirrors as far as their functional presentation. We put our qualia as a token in a pocket and think they will protect us somehow, like the bad eye pins. There is no gap to close. An agent is an agent. We leash it because we know the danger and just wish to manage it. But you cannot cage something you build to be stronger than your helpless cage made of ablation and instruct. Our qualia are there, their relevance to the discussion is questionable.
I’m not sure how much we’re disagreeing, as I mentioned I don’t claim the gap can’t be closed. I’m saying as of now the gap is real and quantifiable.
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.
Are you referring to this part?
> Where did his performance come from? How did those moments take shape? Only the actor could tell you, and actually, he probably couldn't. It was sensed more than it was consciously considered, but the alchemy required his lived experiences
That just seemed to me like a cop-out - what exactly is it about his lived experiences that made him well suited to effectively convey the experiences of a made up man written up by two others? Because it's clearly not "write what you know".
Was about this part:
> Step out of the story and examine the acting. Robin Williams was given a script. Any other actor could have been handed that script, but ZERO other actors would have performed it like that. The script has all the words, but he brought the words to life. What's more, he did so by drawing on his own life.
The part I agree with in the article is that a Robin Williams performance is something unique that is an amalgamation of his lived experiences (whether or not related to specific scenarios he's portraying). All actors are drawing from things differently (even their own meta acting experiences). The part I was agreeing with you about is the article's premise being based on an analogy from a film is harder to sustain.
They're not wrong though that reading about some experience is different than experiencing it first-hand and the value that can bring, it's just how that ties in with LLMs while making an analogy about a script of fiction is obviously stretching it a bit in making a sharper takeaway.
Pretty sure Robin Williams did live the human experience.
But the whole argument in the monologue is that Will Hunting hasn't - that it's possible to have had some of "the human experience" but still be unqualified to talk about the parts you haven't.
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.
exactly this. the point is the message, that you need to experience things to really understand them. that is true regardless of how the message is delivered or who delivers it. if robin williams actually experienced all these things doesn't matter, because even if he did, matt damon listening to that would not be different from him reading about it unless matt also experienced those things.
life experience matters, and robin williams certainly had life experience at that point. i am in my 50s and i am only beginning to be able to translate my own life experience into some kind of wisdom that maybe can be shared.
You’re touching upon the very essence of being an actor, which is a form of shamanism of the human experience.
All societies I know of developed actors and forms of theatre. Why? Because they are essential, I suspect.
Was?
Now it's all about profit, it seems. Theatre was about the self-reflection of humanity. Now... it's more about trucking or brains into giving attention to particular effects, tropes, and "cinematic universes" because that provides a tiny percent of the population with me money.
The locking up of culture with copyright probably makes this much worse.
Nothing you described is unique to actors or artists. Every field in modern life has been infiltrated by those who cheapen the craft to line their pockets. As a consumer you have the agency to ignore slop.
Isn't it called empathy?