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.