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.

Sean (played by Robin Williams) is sitting next to Will (Matt Damon) on a bench in Boston Public Garden. 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.

If you pause the movie scene at just the right moment, you can actually see 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.

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.

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.

***

(Five minutes of stillness later...)

***

Okay, I'm ready to talk about it.

Without saying it, he's saying it. There's a difference.

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.

That's this moment, summed up. That's what WE do as humans and why YOU matter right now, arguably more than ever.

AI has read the internet. It can't read the room. It hasn't lived a life.

It knows. It does not feel nor experience. Because it does not live.

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.

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 claim something like, "AI has never fallen in love. It has never failed then persisted, with scar tissue emerging and dreams still in tact." Then people roll their eyes. I get it. I hear it. I know it feels squishy and easy to dismiss.

Like a gnat buzzing your ear on a park bench.

So let's make it more concrete, shall we?

There is a very real difference between reading about war and being in war. Can we agree?

Reading about love and being in love are fundamentally different things. Yes?

Reading Oliver Twist [giant "Not Equal To" symbol] being an orphan.

Knowing and living are different. And right now, the mere idea of "knowing" is winning out, when it's hilariously insufficient to do anything effective or meaningful or good. The internet and many voices using it would have us convinced that because there's so much to know and because someone else knows more and because a software tool can tell you things it "knows," then all of that should cause you to sit down, shut up, stop feeling confident in what you've done or seen or felt. Because what's your life in the face of infinite knowledge?

Turns out, everything.

Okay fine, we're still too theoretical and artsy fartsy for some. I hate it, but I get it. Set aside Sean's lines and look at Robin Williams's performance. 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. That's how artists function. That's why they can produce things that shock and astound and terrify and bewitch people (h/t to Bourdain for ​that line​). Actors and other artists make choices for how to embody and convey the emotions of the thing, not just "correctly" arrange information for dissemination.

I've heard it said that scientific discovery would happen regardless of who does it. Science is the search for truth about how the world works. Given enough time and resources, Scientist #2 would have discovered the same truth that Scientist #1 discovered.

Art is different.

No two artists would produce the same exact thing. Given enough time and resources, no two actors would have independently landed on the same exact creation, nor even the same subtle element or moment in that scene or piece or project. Because it's not about the search for external truth. It's about the synthesis of that truth into meaning. It's all internal. And zero humans have lived the same lives beat-for-beat.

That shit matters in our work. I don't care if you write blog posts for a Fortune 500, host a podcast about HR, write books about storytelling, or paint in your garage. It's all art. Because art is about making sense of human feelings and existence by confronting the internal, turning it into meaning others can access. Teach a tactic in a social feed or sculpt the next great statue for a museum in Rome, it doesn't matter. It flows through YOU in ways big and small.

Ignore the "YOU" part at your own peril.

Robin Williams certainly didn't.

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. Maybe the pause came from a childhood memory of scuffing his knees as he wrestled on the driveway with a friend. "Get tougher, Robin!" The glances away from Will might come from a lost love which the Hollywood Reporter never told us the man experienced. His face muscles weren't trembling so much as echoing all the trauma he'd endured. He's not remembering his life. He's re-living it.

So much work we encounter online today feels like a script the creator forgot to act. The words are there, but they're lifeless. Then the market said, "Here's a tool to produce more of that stuff, and remember: you can't do anything better than this. Because it's hard, and something that is hard is bad, and also you are bad—until you use our tools!"

They want to distill everything down to a science. It's our job to elevate it to an art.

It turns out AI and people both rely on LLMs as their foundations. AI has large language models. People have little life moments.

But we simply don't draw on ours consistently or confidently enough. Doing so would be their nightmare. They don't know how to sell the dream to people too busy daydreaming. They can't dominate our lives if we're actually living.

It's that stuff which makes our work matter and makes us each matter too, and this moment demands more of it from you and from me. The newcomer to a field or topic, the expert with 40 years' experience, the unknown voice, the broadly known storyteller—it doesn't matter. Drawing on our lives and using our own "LLMs" are what this world needs in an era defined by AI slop and strip-mining every corner of life for eyeballs and dollars.

Plenty of others have similar expertise and skills. Plenty of others talk about similar topics. But how you SEE the world separates you. Said better: how YOU see the world.

Everyone's got a script, but very few understand how to bring the words to life.

Your audience can't learn anything from you that they can't read in a fuckin' book ... or post or video or AI snippet.

Unless you wanna talk about you. Who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in.

But you don't wanna do that, do you? You're terrified of what you might say.

Your move, chief.