The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams

Speaking & Storytelling Advisor to Business Leaders

The best response to AI slop, infinite advice, and online noise is from Robin Williams

There's a moment in the movie Good Will Hunting which perfectly summarizes all the problems with AI slop and online noise and infinite advice content.<br>Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sitting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. I live here, so I know it well. The area is impossibly green, surrounded by willow trees and a sparkling pond and parents chasing their kids who are chasing some mallards who are chasing their ducklings.<br>If you pause the movie scene at just the right moment, you can actually see the exact spot my wife and I took our wedding photos as we tortured 14 of our closest friends in 96-degree humidity one July afternoon.

In this particular moment of the film, Robin Williams delivers a legendary speech.<br>The entire thing is worth watching (allow for five minutes of sitting still afterwards), but in addition to the video, I’ve placed the transcript below with my own emphasis added.

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.<br>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.​<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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.<br>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?<br>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.<br>Your move, chief.

(Five minutes of stillness later...)<br>Okay, I'm ready to talk about it.<br>Without saying it, he's saying it. There's a difference.<br>There's a difference between expertise and wisdom, between theory and experience, between knowing and living. Will has the first in spades. He's the human equivalent of ChatGPT, that's for sure. That gives him a smug attitude that because he's read the books and knows the theories, he's smart and capable and good. But Sean has something Will lacks. Experience. He's actually lived all those things firsthand. War, love, sickness, loss, hopes, dreams, failures, successes. Meanwhile, Will has never been outside Boston, and he's scared to let himself get close to anyone enough to get hurt.<br>That's this moment, summed up. That's what WE do as humans and why YOU matter right now, arguably more than ever.<br>AI has read the internet. It can't read the room. It hasn't lived a life.<br>It knows. It does not feel nor experience. Because it does not live.<br>But you do, and right now, there are endless voices convincing you to stop living, mostly so they can sell you their "secrets" to success or their "magic" tools which profess to know the answers you couldn't possibly know yourself.<br>We've reached a dangerous moment. This moment threatens to convince too many of us that our lived experiences do not matter. I see it often. An artist will...