When Robin Williams Outsmarted ChatGPT
Embodiment is Everything
Often the hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.
—Carl Jung
Above: Machine meets man.
There’s a scene in Good Will Hunting that never leaves me.1
Matt Damon—Will—shows off his book-smarts in the park, flexing facts, dates, and citations like armor.
Robin Williams—Sean—deftly cuts through it with a scalpel.
Williams’ words are well worth repeating:
So 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 who 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 sh-tless 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 f*ckin’ 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?
Matt Damon is AI: all text, no body. Brilliant in recall, dazzling in synthesis, but incapable of smelling paint, tasting bread, or feeling the tremor in a lover’s hand.
It knows everything, but understands nothing. That’s the line in the sand.
We keep pretending language is enough; that if you brute-force enough numbers and letters, intelligence will bloom. But that’s like trying to taste the wind or hear food.
AI can generate a sonnet, but it cannot feel shame. It can solve for heat transfer, but it cannot shiver. It can mimic intimacy, but it cannot fall in love.
Intelligence is more than just computation. It is perception and metabolism and touch and ache and hunger and joy all in one.
It is the humiliation of a first kiss, the dizziness of standing too quickly, the fatigue of carrying grief, the ache in the ribs after delirious laughter, the salt sting of sweat in the eyes, the way hunger hones thoughts and shortens temper.
In the above scene, Williams is human: embodied, scarred, incarnate.
Genesis puts it simply and profoundly “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them…God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.”
It’s there unequivocally: we are “very good.” The jury’s still out on whatever this thing is that we are slowly but surely creating. Cue Jeff Goldblum:
Intelligence without embodiment is a mirage.
Two tweets come to mind; one humorous, the other terrifying:
Catholic teaching has always known this: we are image and likeness in flesh. To be human is not to be a disembodied mind floating in abstraction, but to be spirit fused with bone and blood.
A recent piece of writing articulates this well:
One great folly is to suppose that a chatbot is truly a mind, or even an embodied person with a heart. In such a case, the ethical lapse is entirely in the human user.
Generative AI is simply a tool that generates media or texts, which have some aspect of creativity, in response to prompts that are media or texts. But it has no understanding and no mind. Neither, then, can it have principles. That is, it is not a practical intelligence whose deliberations are in the service of some genuine good, as our minds are supposed to be. In particular, it does not submit itself to the natural law.
What McKinsey reports were to corporations—safe, sterile, deniable—ChatGPT now is to culture: the least-worst option. Competent, but never risky. However, the real intelligence—the kind that creates, suffers, and redeems—will never live in a server rack.
The danger is not that AI becomes human, but that humans settle for Damon when we need Williams—for the semblance of intelligence when what truly makes us intelligent is that we embody it.
Good Will Hunting is not a title, but a task. To hunt for goodness in knowledge, in pain, in love. And that hunt requires flesh.
P.S. Thanks to the one and only R.W. Richey for the deep, insightful conversation that inspired this piece.
Per my about page, White Noise is a work of experimentation. I view it as a sort of thinking aloud, a stress testing of my nascent ideas. Through it, I hope to sharpen my opinions against the whetstone of other people’s feedback, commentary, and input.
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With sincere gratitude,
Tom
If you have yet to see this stupendous film, put down your phone and turn it on now.
One of my most favorite movies is “Good Will Hunting”, along with “A Beautiful Mind”! Robin Williams was outstanding as he, in today’s parlance, “decoded” Will. Will’s friends had no conceptual bridge to Will, but Will navigated the best he could. Robin Williams’ character explained the raw and the real to Will, (even sharing his own humor about his wife’s sleeping noises) and let Will see the deeply human expressed experience of knowing some “one” so well. And Will awakened.
He came to know himself.
I still haven't seen the film, it is my homework assignment for this evening!
Side note - I had a friend in high school who had been dealing with some very heavy things. On one particularly difficult day he asked our substitute teacher if he could be excused to the restroom. He didn't come back. She got very upset and I stood there and explained to her that he needed the space, that him leaving class was necessary for him to breathe. I alluded slightly to what he was dealing with and I will never forget her response to me. She said "I've read 'A Child Called "It"', if that boy can make it through his problems then there is no reason your friend can't." I will never forget that response and well, it reminded me a bit of the quote you shared.