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This is kind of a dumb argument, isn’t it?
I have to imagine someone centuries ago probably complained about inventors wasting their time on some dumb printing presses so smart people could write books and newspapers better when they could have been building better farm tools. But could we have developed the tractor when we did if we were still handwriting everything?
Progress supports progress. Teaching computers to recognize and reproduce pictures might seem like a waste to some people, but how do you suppose a computer will someday disassemble a ship if it is not capable of recognizing what the ship is and what holds it together? Modern AI is primitive, but it will eventually lead to autonomous machines that can actually do that work intelligently without blindly following an instruction set, oblivious to whatever might be actually happening around it.
The argument isn’t against the technology, it’s against the application of that technology.
Path of least resistance. It is harder to build a robot who can disassemble ships with its hands than it is to pattern match together pictures.
This XKCD comes to mind: https://xkcd.com/1425/
Someone doing it automatically doesn’t stop you from doing it manually. It’s still a meritless argument.
This isn’t even close to what they’re saying. It’s closer to complaining about how the Yankees replaced their star pitcher with a modified howitzer.
It’s not about people “wasting their time on some dumb invention,” it’s about how that useful invention is being used to replace jobs that people actually like doing because it’ll save their bosses money. It’s not even like when photography was invented or Photoshop came out and people freaked out about artists being put out of work, because those require different skill sets and opened up entirely new fields of art while also helping optimize other fields. This stuff could improve the fields that they’re created for by helping people optimize their workflow to make the act of creating things easier. But that’s not what they’re doing. It’s being used to mimic the skills of the people who enjoy doing these things so that they don’t have to pay people to do it.
Even ignoring the ethical/moral aspect of this stuff being trained without permission on the work of the people it’s designed to replace, the end goal isn’t to increase the quality of life of people, allowing us more time to do the things we love - things like, you know, art and writing - it’s to make the rich even richer and push people out of well-paying jobs.
The closest example I can think of is when Disney fired all their 2d animators and switched to 3d. They didn’t do it because 3d was better. In many ways, the quality was much worse at the time. But 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren’t, so they could get away with paying them much less. The same exact thing happened with the practical effects vs. digital effects guys in Hollywood right around the same time.
Society has always been losing jobs, the population just pivots to other specialisations. The only reason we fear it is because of our economic system that preys on it and turns it into profit, but that’s an other conversation entirely.
On the subject of losing creative venues, both your examples(photography and Photoshop) show how technology didn’t detract from the arts but add to it, letting the average person do much more. The same will be true for AI, I can see an inevitable boom happening in the filmmaking and animation industry, not to mention comic books and most of all indie gaming. It’s in the long run empowering for the individual imo.
The economic system is what he’s talking about here. That was my point. The entire conversation from the side against this stuff has always been about the economic situation of it. Without that factor, I think the only thing people would care about is whether or not their work is being used without their permission/maliciously.
As for Photoshop and photography, that’s actually why I brought those up specifically. Because they were feared as things that would destroy artists’ jobs and actually brought about entirely new fields of art - and also because they’re the two people bring up when people argue against LLM replacing people’s jobs, acting like they’re just some Luddites afraid of science.
Right now, the way I see it with AI is that there are 2 distinct groups benefiting from it: those whose workflow has been improved from the use of AI, and those who think AI can get them the result of work without having to either do the work themselves or pay somebody else to do it. And thanks to the economic issues that are at the heart of this whole thing, that second group is set to harm the number of people who can spend time creating things simply because they now have to work a job that isn’t creating things and no longer have the time to put towards that. So I can see AI creating a whole new art boom or a bust in equal measure. That second group is of concern to the art communities as well because they only see the destination and don’t see that the journey is just as important to the act of creation, and that is already causing schisms between artists and “prompters” who think that they’re just as skilled because they used a generator to make some cool stuff. People are already submitting unedited, prompted work to art and writing competitions.
I get the sentiment, but it’s a bad example. Transformer models don’t recognize images in any useful way that could be fed to other systems.They also don’t have any capability of actual understanding or context. Heavily simplifying here, tokenisation of inputs allows them to group clusters of letters together into tokens, so when it receives tokens it can spit out whatever the training data says it should.The only actual things that are improving greatly here which could be used in different systems are natural language processing, natural language output and visual output.EDIT: Crossed out stuff that is wrong.
“AI” researcher here. The only reason there are models that can “write” and “create art” is because that data is available for training. Basically people put massive amounts of digital text and images on the Internet and the companies scraped all of it to train the models. If there were big enough datasets for ship building, that would happen too…
Besides, what the guy is yapping about it is 80% a robotics problem not an AI problem. It’s apples and oranges.
He’s essentially saying why can Will Smith finally eat pasta normally while we still don’t have the robotic workforce from the 2001 Will Smith movie “I, Robot”.
He’s a programmer, why doesn’t he stop working on aligning buttons on web applications and work on shipbuilding robots!?!?
If he’s still aligning buttons on web applications he’s not a very good developer that’s easy now you just use a grid container.
Not really. You would still need to, you know, build drones or automated factories to actually perform the salvaging. But the point is that nobody DID, because capitalism values profit over human life. Nobody who “matters” is interested in solving that problem.
Actually that’s not true at all, there’s lots of interest in robotics (check out Boston Dynamic) but it’s a really really hard problem. The main issue is developing a controlling intelligence sophisticated enough to be able to use the robot to do a diverse range of tasks. The actual physical mechanical building of the robot isn’t that hard.
Of course the way you get that controlling intelligence is AI. So he is complaining about people developing a solution to the problem he’s demanding that they solve. He’s not happy because they’re not magically skipping steps.
This idiot wants fully sapient robots without developing AI in the first place, not sure how on earth he expects that to happen.
This is correct, why is it being downvoted?
I think you’re underestimating the mechanical and chemistry problems that still need to be solved before autonomous robots that can perform a task like ship salvage effectively. There’s a very good reason that basically all industrial robots spend their lives plugged into a wall socket.
Not true. We have capable robots now. See Boston Dynamics like the other commenter said. Plus we have had industrial robots making cars and stuff forever now. To make robots that can handle a wide variety of things (every ship is bound to be different) is hard and we don’t have data to train such models (see reinforcement learning, imitation learning, “sim2real” problem etc)
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take. Software automation is a hell of a lot easier than creating robotic automation to disassemble ships of all shapes and sizes. That’s why art automation has been done, and industrial freighter recycling automation has not been.
How would that even be possible? Presumably, you’d need to break the ships down into pieces first, and even then, you’ll be dealing with huge numbers of oddly shaped and sized components of varying materials. It makes a lot more sense to have people do that, though it is likely very dangerous.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations
Yes. That’s why they do these things in third world countries. The people there are cheaper than robots will ever be.
3th
threeth.
I get the sentiment, but that is a really dumb take.
$13B invested in OpenAI feels more and more like malinvestment and graft, incentivized by our disastrous energy policy and enormous tech subsidies.
This isn’t purely software automation. Its also an investment in physical media and machines, new or renovated energy infrastructure, and enormous volumes of potable water.
Seems more like a job for unions and workplace safety regulations than for robots
In 2020, a leaked company memo detailed Amazon’s use of a new technology — the geoSPatial Operating Console (SPOC) — to analyze and visualize data sets pertaining to threats to the company, including unions. Reported by Jason Del Rey and Shirin Ghaffary at Vox, some of the data points related to unions include:
Amazon-owned Whole Foods’ market activism and unionization efforts. Flow patterns of union grant money. The presence of local union chapters and alt labor groups.The approach is an obvious attempt by the company to use more passive means of identifying and neutralizing union sympathizers in the company.
“Amazon’s tracking of workers’ micro-movements, decision points and searches and then linking all of that data to that of unions, community groups and legislative policy campaigns is union busting on its face,” said Stuart Appelbaum, President of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) in a statement at the time.
That is very true, but my critique was more focused on the difference between automating software tasks vs mechanical tasks, especially with non-uniform inputs and not the economic investment required. Some tasks are better suited to automation - and plagiarizing art is far easier than deconstructing and recycling massive industrial freighters.
Not on the side of the AI art generators here - that was just low hanging fruit compared to something like was suggested in the original post. Definitely need extremely strong labor law to protect against AI union busting (and union busting generally)
my critique was more focused on the difference between automating software tasks vs mechanical tasks
Somewhat paradoxically, we’ve been much more successful automating mechanical tasks than digital ones. We’ve had steam looms and automotive assembly plants far longer than server farms and super computers.
And I might argue this kind of automation has been far more fruitful. I can point to a lot more in my daily life that has benefited from the industrialization of steel and plastic fabrication than what I’ve received from Google Search Results.
To say the millions of man-hours and trillions of dollars sunk into the advertisement and entertainment industries couldn’t be put to better use… Come on, man. The latest Marvel movie wasn’t so good that I wouldn’t have traded it for a globalized 1980s British NHS.
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I think you absolutely nailed the analysis. Another small point to keep in mind is that for Microsoft, all the investment in OpenAi comes back as a revenue figure when the system works operating on top of the Azure platform.
Software automation being easier seems like a reason to not have so many people doing it, then? Like, the harder problem is the one that could really use all of the focus?
But the harder problems aren’t as obviously profitable for a large number of tech CEOs, and they’re not ripe for being a “winning glittery ticket” for a large number of comp sci students looking to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley.
Making art and writing just happens to be easy to automate with neural networks and machine learning, neither of which was originally researched for the purpose of replacing artists and writers.
Good luck disassembling a ship with a neural network. And maybe do some research about the difficulties of application-specific robotics.
I think it is just a matter of where you put resources. I am sure if you put resources into improving recycling ships some advancements will be done (it won’t be done using neural network probably).
But that’s true of everything. This guy is explicitly angry about AI not being used in ship decommission, which is just weird.
It’s not about the ships.
Shipbreaking is the author’s example, but it’s not the author’s point.
He could have bemoaned the lack of tree-trimming robots or the vaporware nature of self-driving cars instead.
The key point is the heavy investment in automating away things that bring us joy while doing nothing about vast classes of unpleasant drudgery.
Hell, look at roofers. A lot of injuries there are from falls, easily preventable with fall harnesses. It doesn’t even require a big research investment! Our society simply doesn’t value those lives enough to protect them.
No they are developing an autonomous system to solve pretty much every possible problem, but these problems are easy problems so they’re the ones that are getting automated first. Make no mistake they will come for every job.
Define art, though.
As it stands neural networks and LLMs can’t do it, because they lack imagination. A human can use it as tool to make art though, and we don’t have these silly kinds of conversations about photoshop (anymore!).
As for the OP, you’ve taken it a bit more literally and reacted a bit more defensively than I think is warranted. The point is about our systems priorities, not so much the specifics.
I have a feeling if we performed a lobotomy-like surgery on someone that eliminated their imagination and told them to just put paint on a canvas, you’d still call that art.
I would, at least. There’s some subjectivity to the definition of art and what people think has artistic value.
Of course. That’s the point; it’s subjective, and yet we have people declaring that AI/LLM output isn’t art.
I miss when Lemmings actually replied why they were downvoting…
I hate this take because I dream of a world where AI can assist any storyteller in bringing their story to life.
The rest is just capitalism. Capitilism is the issue, not the AI.
Well, you’re lucky. You currently live in a world where AI can assist any storyteller in bringing their story to life.
Brought to you by checks notes… you know what, never mind…
Human behavior is the issue, capitalism is just one system into which it may develop.
Nah both are
You know you’re not required to use AI, right?
Well good luck telling that to companies
Ah yes just write code for the ship fold itself neatly back into reusable materials.
Just build a grinder the size of a football stadium to shred battleships into pea-sized chunks, and sort according to metal type, how hard can it be?
It might be more cost effective to build a concrete bunker the size of a football stadium, use placed explosives to blow up the ship inside of the bunker, and then shred the exploded ship up into pea-sized chunks
Teach me how to code that and which compiler will spit out the football stadium grinder
Teach me to how to code a compiler to spit out fully realistic and accurate videos via text prompts.
Just drop the ship off the conveyor onto a bar. The good ships will bounce higher, and the bad ones won’t. Problem solved.
Sarcasm aside, this is how they sort cranberries and where the expression “raising the bar” comes from. The higher the bar is set, the tighter the constraints on which cranberries will bounce onto the “good” conveyor.
I actually had to look this up, why are you spreading misinformation?
The idiom “raise the bar” came into use around 1900 and comes from the sport of track and field. The high jump event and the pole vault event both involve raising a crossbar incrementally to see how high the participants can jump or pole vault.
Because I grew up in cranberry country and that’s what I had always been told. I’m not surprised to find this out though, because that makes a lot of sense.
OP: “We’ve tragically gone down a path of quantifying and min-maxing every aspect of existence, including creativity and the value of human life.”
Comments: “OP clearly doesn’t understand the comparative efficiency of the ROI here.”
Irony so thick you can cut it.
He chose a poor way of conveying his message.
Disappointed programmer here. I thought I could automate farming so that people wouldn’t die of hunger. Now I realise that if you automate farming, it would just make some CEO more money because his company now makes corn syrup and destroys rural communities even faster.
I got my “contract not renewed”, for the Fortune 500 B2B CRM company I worked for.
I can try to bust my ass to make my 2018 laptop try to render images I can’t draw, which does give me some pleasure. It’s not the AI tool’s fault humanity sucks, it’s the goddamn people with money.
This sort of ignores the fact that the advances in that technology are widespread applicable to all tasks, we literally just started with text and image generation because:
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The training data is plentiful abd basically free to get your hands on
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It’s easy to verify it works
LLMs will crawl so that ship breaking robots can run.
He’s ignoring it because he’s not complaining about the tech, but the way it’s being used. Instead of being used to make it easier for artists and writers to do their jobs, it’s being used to replace them entirely so their bosses don’t have to pay them. It’s like when Disney switched to 3d animation. They didn’t do it because the tech was better and made the job easier. They did it because 2d animators are unionized and 3d animators aren’t, so they could pay the new guys less.
And these are the kinds of jobs people actually want - to the point where they don’t pay anywhere near as well as they should because companies can exploit people’s passion for what they do.
Imagine a world of construction workers and road crews, but no civil engineers, architects, or city planners. Imagination and creativity automated away in the name of the almighty profit margin.
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Second this.
We’re in the first days and everyday I add a new model or tech to my reading list. We’re close to talking to our CPUs. We’re building these stacks. We’re solving the memory problems. Don’t need RAG with a million tokens, guerrilla model can talk with APIs, most models are great at python which is versatile as fuck, I can see the singularity on the horizon.
Try Ollama if you want to test things yourself.
Use GPT4 if you want to get an inkling of the potential that’s coming. I mean really use it.
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Oh no. You can’t do it for fun now because the computers are doing it.
It’s a stupid thing to be angry about because AI isn’t about making art it’s just doing that is a good benchmark because it’s very visual and you can easily see at a glance how much more advanced one AI is than another one.
You really think that mega corporations are interested in art? If that was all AI could be used for no one would be researching it.
It’s not necessarily for fine arts, but for cheap content generation.
For example, it can generate fairly accurate 3d models for environments and secondary characters without paying hundreds of people to do this manually. It can generate videos from text prompts without hours of human labor for filming, editing, post-producing, etc.
I remember years ago everyone was saying that art would probably be the last thing AI would be able to handle and menial jobs would probably be the first.
Now look at where we are!
It’s because people like to think that art is some unique human ability. They never really explain why they think this, they just say it.
But really it’s just about looking at the world and creating representations of it in various styles. None of which is some ineffable thing. It’s all electrons moving around a system at the end of the day, it is all physical. If it is physical, then it can be simulated.
They never really explain why they think this, they just say it.
But- muh 'magination! Robo cain’t do dat!
The robot dystopia will not be caused by evil AI enslaving humanity.
No matter how advanced or how self aware, AI will lack the ambition that is part of humanity, part of us due to our evolutionary history.
An AI will never have an opinion, only logical conclusions and directives that it is required to fulfil as efficiently as possible. The directives, however, are programmed by the humans who control these robots.
Humans DO have ambitions and opinions, and they have the ability to use AI to enslave other humans. Human history is filled with powerful, ambitious humans enslaving everyone else.
The robot dystopia is therefor a corporate dystopia.
I always roll my eyes when people invoke Skynet and Terminator whenever something uncanny is shown off. No, it’s not the machines I’m worried about.
Have you met people with opinions? A lot of their opinions consist of preprogrammed responses that you could train a bot to regurgitate.
No matter how advanced or how self aware, AI will lack the ambition that is part of humanity, part of us due to our evolutionary history.
The ambition isn’t the issue. Its a question of power imbalance.
The Paperclip Maximizing Algorithm doesn’t have an innate desire to destroy the world, merely a mandate to turn everything into paperclips. And if the algorithm has enough resources at its disposal, it will pursue this quixotic campaign without regard for any kind of long term sensible result.
The robot dystopia is therefor a corporate dystopia.
There is some argument that one is a consequence of the other. It is, in some sense, the humans who are being programmed to maximize paperclips. The real Roko’s Basilisk isn’t some sinister robot brain, but a social mythology that leads us to work in the factors that make the paper clips, because we’ve convinced ourselves this will allow us to climb the Paperclip Company Corporate Ladder until we don’t have to make these damned things anymore.
Someone screwed up if a paperclip maximiser is given the equipment to take apart worlds, rather than a supply of spring steel
Thats the beauty of it. The maximizer would understand that creating a machine that breaks appart worlds would maximize the paperclip output. It will be a “natural” progression
We’re not even close to artificial general intelligence, so I’d like to see if you have anything to substantiate this claim.
(Not saying it’s far fetched, though, just that it seems silly to be so sure at this point in time.)
This shit again?
The tasks AI is replacing only require powerful computers and internet access.
If you want to make that comparison, to scrap fucking ships using AI, you need a robot that the AI can control.
Or what else do you want to do? Putting a fucking computer server that is running some ship scrapping AI in the middle of a shipyard and see if it magically grows arms?
No, I’m not denying we have an issue with this fucking capitalism (with and without AI), but stop comparing “software” tasks with other tasks what would required specialized machinery/robots.
Isn’t the point that we don’t bother looking into those specialized machines and tools because why bother when we can just throw meatbags at it?
The image generator AIs are a byproduct of image recognition AIs, they’re related.
Image recognition development is fundamental to advanced industrial automation. We’re getting there, the media is just not covering that part because it’s more fun to write an article about stupid computers thinking we have 6 fingers than about false positives dropping 2% because of some new development
we don’t bother looking into those specialized machines and tools
Yes we do. It’s just a hell of a lot more expensive, and a lot more difficult.
But this is total nonsense because those tools are getting developed and have huge budgets. Many of them are already on the market and in use, especially remote control cutting tools.
Far more money has been invested in self drive and ambulatory robotics than image gen, it just so happens image gen is far easier than walking or using a saw.
Gpt 5 is coming around October and I think it’ll likely be the version that is able to effectively create task based workflow so it’ll be able to set up simulation training to evolve kinematic solutions within a framework, basically the thing we need robots to be able to do. When that’s possible you can expect to see a big boom in multiuse robotics.
People are cheaper than robots, ergo they are more expendable
I mean, you can still write and make art? AI isnt taking that away from you? If you’re upset that its replacing you career wise, maybe you’re just upset that you need a job to live and that livelihood is at the whims of capitalists?
It can be both. Why is the first thing we’re seeking to automate with this current generation of ai the creative careers that humans can do?
Because they happened to be the fields that got there first. It’s not like these are recent trends, ELIZA and AARON are from the 1960’s. But it really is just the perfect example of “They were so preoccupied with if they could they never stopped to think if they should” spread over 60 years of technological advancement.
We’re not “seeking” to do anything. Ai art is a pretty logical and inevitable step in our progress in this recent breakthrough in machine learning. But we’re making AI out of everything for which there is a large amount of data on the internet. The same tech that is creating AI art by stealing assets off of the Internet is also combing through sequenced DNA to find patterns and analyzing telescope data to find anomalies.
And none of this new AI tech has anything to do with robotics or ship dismantling so it makes sense that that isn’t the field being advanced by it. Although I bet you could fiddle with AI to analyze data around ship dismantling to make it more efficient.
Its another tool. For me one that has allowed me to access my creativity FAR MORE than any artistic tool previous. Did photoshop destroy photography? Did Photography destroy realistic paintings? If you dont like the tool personally, all previous artistic tools humanity has created are still available to you
edit: for those downvoting me, Pandora’s box is opened, you can either adapt with the times, or align yourselves with the Luddites who burned down the textile factories when lace became able to be mass produced, and are now synonymous with being out of date with current technology
You use the word upset as in there is no rational reason to care about this and emotions are invalid or lesser.
Anyway, cameras and paintings…
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