this post was submitted on 26 Feb 2024
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[–] lledrtx@lemmy.world 71 points 2 years ago (2 children)

"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...

[–] apemint@lemmy.world 41 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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".

[–] Tja@programming.dev 19 points 2 years ago (1 children)

He's a programmer, why doesn't he stop working on aligning buttons on web applications and work on shipbuilding robots!?!?

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[–] rektdeckard@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 16 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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.

[–] emptiestplace@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

This is correct, why is it being downvoted?

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[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 53 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (3 children)

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

[–] SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 23 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] A_Very_Big_Fan@lemmy.world 11 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

3th

threeth.

[–] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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

The Role of AI in Union Busting: How Employers Use Artificial Intelligence to Keep Workers From Unionizing

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.

[–] ALoafOfBread@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

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)

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[–] glibg10b@lemmy.ml 45 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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.

[–] Sprokes@jlai.lu 20 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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).

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 5 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

But that's true of everything. This guy is explicitly angry about AI not being used in ship decommission, which is just weird.

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[–] Daft_ish@lemmy.world 39 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Tja@programming.dev 5 points 2 years ago

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...

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[–] arin@lemmy.world 38 points 2 years ago (4 children)

Ah yes just write code for the ship fold itself neatly back into reusable materials.

[–] Agent641@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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?

[–] daltotron@lemmy.world 5 points 2 years ago

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

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[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 30 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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."

[–] yamanii@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago

Irony so thick you can cut it.

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[–] Skullgrid@lemmy.world 24 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

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.

[–] pixxelkick@lemmy.world 23 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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:

  1. The training data is plentiful abd basically free to get your hands on

  2. It's easy to verify it works

LLMs will crawl so that ship breaking robots can run.

[–] EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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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[–] Mango@lemmy.world 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

Oh no. You can't do it for fun now because the computers are doing it.

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[–] Tattorack@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago (5 children)

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.

[–] Clubbing4198@lemmy.world 7 points 2 years ago

Have you met people with opinions? A lot of their opinions consist of preprogrammed responses that you could train a bot to regurgitate.

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[–] cm0002@lemmy.world 14 points 2 years ago (2 children)

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!

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[–] XEAL@lemm.ee 13 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Zorque@kbin.social 5 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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?

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[–] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 12 points 2 years ago

People are cheaper than robots, ergo they are more expendable

[–] Kedly@lemm.ee 11 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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?

[–] mriormro@lemmy.world 10 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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?

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[–] Halosheep@lemm.ee 8 points 2 years ago (1 children)

According to this guy, only one thing is allowed to happen at a time. Sorry all, LLMs are the only option. Nothing else.

[–] Wilzax@lemmy.world 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (1 children)

I don't see google, twitter, facebook, nvidia and alibaba working on AIs more than the ones designed to replace humans for content generation, and I don't see money from anyone else of that size going into such projects either.

[–] FooBarrington@lemmy.world 9 points 2 years ago (7 children)

Then you should take a better look, because most of those companies are researching AI for tasks far beyond content generation - Google and NVIDIA for example have been doing a lot of research on AI for robotics.

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[–] IrateAnteater@sh.itjust.works 7 points 2 years ago (12 children)

I do industrial automation for a living, and I just want to point out that automating things that exist purely in the digital domain is far easier than automating things like ship breaking.

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[–] daltotron@lemmy.world 6 points 2 years ago (11 children)

You know, interesting kind of aside here, I haven't seen talked about anywhere at all, but I would like to interrogate everyone here about it to get their thoughts.

I don't think AI is generally going to just replace artists wholesale, or is going to take over without some sort of editing, and that editing will probably necessitate a kind of creative process, and that's probably going to be adjacent to what lots of artists already do. AI as a tool, rather than as a replacement. We saw this with the shift from 2d to 3d in animation. This was accompanied by lack of unionization in the 3d workforce, yes, and was incentivized by it, but the convergence of these mediums, even really only fairly recently, has bolstered artists' ability to make much smaller projects work on a larger scale than they previously would've been able to. If you really need evidence of this, you can kind of look at much earlier newgrounds stuff vs the later work. There's less people using that site now, and the userbase has probably aged up substantially over time, but I do think it's probably fair to say that the quality of the work has gone up (quality obviously being subjective). Basically, Blender is a pretty good software, it's very cool and good.

SO, to the point, if this is the case, and artists are able to substantially cut down on their workload, while still producing similar or larger outputs, or better outputs, will this actually affect art, kind of, as an industry? Is there a pre-allocated volume of art that public consciousness will allow to exist? In which case, the amount of artists would go down. Or is it more the case that there is only a pre-allocated amount of capital that can be given to art? In which case, the number of artists might be the same, and we might just see larger volumes of art in general? I think historically the latter is the case, but that might have changed, or, more realistically, I think it would be dependent on external economic factors.

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[–] intensely_human@lemm.ee 6 points 2 years ago

This is one of the most interesting takes I’ve seen on AI.

Such a good point. We totally need robots to be the ones picking through piles of E-waste to get precious metals, not little kids.

[–] Opafi@feddit.de 6 points 2 years ago

Mentioned it in another comment already... People already do this with robotics and ai

https://www.leviathan.eu/

[–] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 years ago

The most automated stuff are tedious things like rotoscoping. Creative projects still require human expertise to assemble, fine-tune, and use ML tools effectively.

Repetitive Basic tasks have been continually made more manageable by technology, and thanks to that skilled professionals have been able to complete more ambitious projects that would have been impossible for individuals or small groups to take on before.

[–] testfactor@lemmy.world 4 points 2 years ago

I wonder what he's a developer for?

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