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.
Cant imagine how it even could be automated without advanced robotics. Those ships are freakin HUGE! Maybe a collection of robotic snakes with cutting lazers attached to their heads and some little scuttle bots to pick up the pieces the snakes knock off? Just cut the whole thing into 1' disks or maybe hexagons is better
It can be automated it would just never be worth the cost. Every ship is different and has its own requirements.
If they were all 100% exactly the same, using the same hardware in all the same places then it would be cost effective to automate their disassembly. Otherwise every single ship is a one-off edge case.
Even if they're mostly the same many will have had upgrades, repairs, and changes over time that could literally throw a wrench (that someone accidentally left inside an interior area) into the whole (automated) operation.
I think the best case scenario is to enforce shipbuilding standards and deny ships entry if they don't follow them (for loading/unloading, anyway). Then you setup standardized dry docks with robotic arms that are already preprogrammed to disassemble these standard vessels. They may need human guidance for some areas that are allowed to be non-conforming but as long as the majority of the ship adheres to the standard it'd make the whole process much smoother and more environmentally friendly.
From an environmental standpoint the real issues from these vessels isn't even the difficulty of (environmentally friendly) disassembly. It's their emissions over their working lifetime and super toxic things like anti-fouling coatings that where we have no good way to remove or dispose of them. Like, even if you rip off the outside of a ship what do you do with that toxic waste? It's nasty stuff.
Definitely not terrifying
[...] 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.
Not that you're saying otherwise, however isn't that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
Not that you’re saying otherwise, however isn’t that even more of a reason more developers and resources should be allocated toward automating complex and risky physical processes?
You're solving for the wrong problem from the perspective of people with money investing money to solve these problems.
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Shipbreaking, while dangerous for the workers, isn't expensive because it is done in far flung countries with workers that have low wages, few protections for safety, and long term health consequences.
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Art and writing (for western consumption) requires educated and talented people which are expensive to employ.
People with money, looking for a return, want that return their spending, not reduce human suffering.
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Processing the digital world is just the first step. You can't just build a safe autonomous ship disassembly robot without making sure your algorithms are actually sound. Look at self driving cars, they're far from being safe and acceptable. Jumping straight into this problem without testing the shit out of your code in a virtual world is a mistake.
I mean automating it would certainly be a challenge but the first step would be building tools and robotics to allow human operators to more safely and effectively manage the tasks. Then you streamline the industrialized processes. Then you think about automating things.
But this is all really an economic problem, not a technical one. Software tools have minimal resource costs (compared to building/destroying a ship) but require skilled (expensive) laborers to operate. So to cut costs in any digital field you need to get rid of the expensive laborers. Thus the push for AI to replace any computer-bound work. Physical labor is already considered dirt-cheap in our fucked society, and no one is rushing to add expensive tools in fields where disposable people will suffice.
I sympathize immensely with the OP image's final point, but "working for the right company" isn't going to fix it. Reorganizing society is necessary, rethinking what we culturally value and uphold.
Finally, some fucking sense into all of this.
Yeah exactly, I work in AI and robotics for medicine, and im so goddamn sick and tired of these people and their absolute god-awful uneducated takes on AI.
And this guy's claiming to be a programmer too which makes it doubly worse because he really should know better.
It stems from people who seem to think that having the idea is the hard part, and the implementation is just a matter of time and money.
Shh. Just give one of them dancing robot dogs an impact driver attachment. They'll figure it out in a week.
Once we perfect doing it in software, then we can graduate to hardware. Today, digital paintings; tomorrow, real paintings; next year, tear down a fucking ship!
And yet, people do... https://www.leviathan.eu/
That is really cool job description I haven't seen pop up before! Would you mind sharing what type of things you need to automate? It sounds so interesting, I never really understood why factory line jobs should exist for example * because the work is dangerous, the opposite of stimulating/engaging (works for some sure), and just generally overall depressing unpleasant places to work. We SHOULD be striving for a world where humans don't have to do such menial unfufilling work.
*very superficially, all the nuance that makes it continue to be necessary and exist I understand)
I work in the auto industry, so programming the machines that make the car parts. Humans are still involved because getting machines to handle changing conditions is very slow, expensive, and still winds up unreliable in a lot of cases. The simple process of picking a randomly oriented part up out of a bin and placing it accurately on a fixture is actually very difficult for a machine to do, when compared to how easily a human can accomplish the exact same task.
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.
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.
Well, this is simply incorrect. And confidently incorrect at that.
Vision transformers (ViT) is an important branch of computer vision models that apply transformers to image analysis and detection tasks. They perform very well. The main idea is the same, by tokenizing the input image into smaller chunks you can apply the same attention mechanism as in NLP transformer models.
ViT models were introduced in 2020 by Dosovitsky et. al, in the hallmark paper "An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale" (https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929). A work that has received almost 30000 academic citations since its publication.
So claiming transformers only improve natural language and vision output is straight up wrong. It is also widely used in visual analysis including classification and detection.
"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".
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.
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
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)
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yep and when we invented mechanical computers, we put human computers out of the job.
When we invented the automatic loom we put weavers out of the job.
When we invented electric lights we put lamplighters out of the job.
When we invented digital art we put many brushmakers, canvas makers, paint makers out of the job.
This is the cost of progress.
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.
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?
There are plenty of people working on automation for manual tasks, but it's a really hard problem. Making machines that can move around freely and are compact as humans is really hard. Automation works really well on assembly lines where parts can move to the machine.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
Big reason why I just build cute little games as a hobby instead of writing spreadsheet software for a megacorp to optimize the lowest quarterly earners out of a job, or develop AI to optimize myself out of a job.
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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According to this guy, only one thing is allowed to happen at a time. Sorry all, LLMs are the only option. Nothing else.
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.
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.
Got vehemently disagreed with, without counter-argument, for making the point that 'AI' art already requires a decent amount of human input and knowledged tinkering to get an adequate result.
I, for example, can't sit down and make Midjourney output a human with only five fingers per hand. I'm sure I wouldn't have to look too hard to find a tutorial on how to solve that hurdle, and the effort is no doubt a lot less than painting it myself. But my point stands that 'AI'/LLMs aren't doing diddly useful squat on their own and won't be for a while because so far they just do not understand abstract reasoning and so need humans to accommodate that element.
I recall an excellent article that pointed out 'AI' doesn't understand a prompt that says 'no giraffes' because people do not label every image on the internet that does not contain giraffes with 'no giraffes'.
So, waffle coming to a close, I absolutely agree with you. As it stands - and likely for a long while yet - 'AI'/LLMs are just a tool that can be helpful to artists in certain situations.
The point of the OP microblog still stands though; our system prioritises made up money trees over actual human life.
Got vehemently disagreed with, without counter-argument, for making the point that ‘AI’ art already requires a decent amount of human input and knowledged tinkering to get an adequate result.
I think that is a good point for now, but I think we are also going toward a point where that won't be much of a hurdle.
The issue will be turning what AI can create into something people actually want to watch. And that will definitely still take humans until an AGI emerges.
You know what's interesting is that I bet a lot of those problems with, say, stable diffusion, and generative models, would be solved, if they were more capable of trusting their prompters to have some measure of artistic ability, rather than only being able to put in keywords. It'd be much easier, I would think, to interface with something that makes images, through the language of images.
Drawing thumbnails, or stick figures, or basic shapes and forms, would, I think, make it much easier to interact with the model, and get what you want out of it. You could just draw a stick figure of a hand, and blam, proper number of fingers, and all that. It's really funny to me, that I think, a core problem with much of this technology is basically just that it's kind of become separated from the artistic methods which it is meant to assist. We could do a great deal with what already exists, without the need to endlessly scale it up (apparently the only form of concrete progression that the space is capable of), if only we were willing to perhaps focus on making it more usable and perhaps if we were more open to artistic input. Alas, this is not to be.
But I suppose that would happen to anything that falls victim to being "the next big thing" in the tech space, like crypto, or NFTs, or what have you. Just turns into a pile of shit. The midas touch, but instead of gold, things turn to shit. The shitass touch.
Edit: oh yeah also agree with all of what you said this shit kinda sucks bunk as it is, but mostly also people have a problem with capitalism. I think this problem in particular gets a lot of air because of how much influence artists and writers, creatives, have over the airwaves, generally, as high profile communicators, and how this is kind of the main problem capitalism is confronting them with in this particular moment. It's also just kind of a high profile thing, everyone's dumping into it rn, which sucks.
The issue is that most art is not made just for display. Concept art, corporate art, icons, stock art, and more is how artists make their bread and butter. You might not be able to sell an unedited AI image as a print (yet), but making, say, 100 icons for a mid budget mobile game goes from a small freelance job for an artist to no job at all. Same for someone who makes all that stock art you see on news articles or random blogs. The truth is, the vast majority of the art we look at every day isn't meant to be critically scrutinized, but it still requires artists to make. AI art dramatically reduces the small but numerous jobs for artist, who already struggle to make a living.
The contentious part is that all of this AI was trained on decades of living artists' work (and associated descriptions provided for accessibility) without their permission, and now it is actively, not theoretically, replacing their jobs. Now artists are hesitant to even post the art they want to make for fear that models will be trained to reproduce their style.
I mean, twofold questions here. Were artists really wanting those jobs in the first place, for one? I would think that, you know, along those lines, this is just kinda the long end of a process that has been taking place throughout the whole of the 20th century. Used to be that you would have to get someone to paint your billboard, paint your glass storefront, used to be that you would have to hire skilled draftsmen to draw up blueprints on huge boards, for basically every product. Now we're at the point where you only hire an artist to draw something if you really want to get something that looks very original, for some reason, because otherwise you can probably just get it in a stock library, and make whatever you want with stock assets, even without AI. You might also still be looking to artists for product design, but that's maybe going to be less and less the case as you get design processes that are driven more by committee, and consumer feedback.
So along those lines, the total number of art available to artists to do, would be dwindling all the time, basically because the total amount of art floating around in culture, or at least, the total amount of art monetizable by culture, has remained the same for much of the 20th century, and automation has simply made it easier to get rid of artists.
Second question, right, is... I dunno, I forgot it. damn. There's probably also some theoretical point about capitalism and how this is just the mechanism through how it's working at current, and not the fault of the technology specifically as much as the organization and forces of the market, but I feel like everyone's already made that point mostly, and it wasn't gonna be my second question. I dunno maybe if I cook long enough I'll remember what it was gonna be.
I agree.
The most succinct way I can make this argument to the layperson is that "AI", as it exists today, is terrifyingly good at mimicry. But that's all it can do. Attributing more to this synthetic neural network makes about as much sense as saying a parrot understands grammar and syntax because it can perfectly reproduce a few words in the right context, or with the right prompt.
From this vantage point, we can clearly see how this technology is severely limited. It can be asked to synthesize new outputs, but that's merely an extrapolation of the input training set. While this isn't all that different from what people can, and often do, it's not a fully rational intelligence that solves problems outside that framing. For that, one needs a general intelligence, capable of extrapolating meaning from context and generating novel concepts.
Moreover, if you want an AI to generate something, you first need to define the general ballpark for the right answer(s). Data gathering, cleaning, categorization (tagging), is a big labor problem that feeds into the AI itself. So there are also a lot of real world problems that don't fit this model for a whole bunch of reasons. Like not having a working dataset at all, information that doesn't digitize well, or areas that are too small to properly feed this process in the first place. People function just fine in those spaces, so again, we can see a gap that is not easily closed.
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.
Because those are byproducts of trying to build AGI to help augment the white collar workforce, which as others have said purely digital work is just lower hanging fruit right now.
It may cost millions of dollars to build a model, but that can be after an exponential amount of iterations. Doing the same with IRL hardware and capital is the exception not the norm.
The next phases are better digital twins and applying these advances to them to find strategic meat space projects to put hours to.
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.
Mentioned it in another comment already... People already do this with robotics and ai
This is a kind of bad take really. Just because AI can make art does not mean that's the only thing that it will be used for.
Realistically though it's blindingly obvious why AI isn't being used for ship breaking, and that's because it's not a purely software problem, it requires interfacing with robots and humanoid robots at that because a standard mechanical arm attached to an assembly line won't cut it in this scenario. So it's an incredibly difficult problem to solve and being angry that someone hasn't solved it yet is stupid.
If this guy is really a programmer he should know that.
While he's at it he should automate doctors, mechanics, contractors... It's all so easy right???
I wonder what he's a developer for?
They make equipment to cut up ships from the relative safety of an excavator.
I've been saying this ages. Thank you assholes for focusing on automating art and games like chess. What is the benefit for humanity? You just ruined my hobbies. Focus on automatic plumbers and farmers, for Thoth's sake.
I can't speak for art, but I think that engines certainly have their place in improving the way we play chess (and not just objectively, but in terms of human play too). Leela's latest WDL (win/draw/loss) contempt is a really neat tool that looks for complexity in a position over objective 'best' moves, producing uniquely aggressive positions see this vid for an example implementation.
Everything that can be digitalized, like words, music or pictures, will go through this enshittification process one day, be it by humans or by AI or both. It's not good but at the same time it's a great challenge for artists in these times to create experiences that cannot be digitalized, or displayed on a screen.
I LOATHE writing longer texts.
Have you tried not being illiterate? It’s super helpful.
Have you tried not emulating the personality of a piece of sand paper? That's super helpful too!
He's right, why haven't people started working on digitalized ship breaking.....algorithms?
Algorithms are fundamental for physical tasks as well. Robotics has been around for many decades, with some infrastructure and the right algos I'm sure it could be tackled, whatever ship breaking is.
It already is
The world loves Michael Jackson and The Beatles. The problem is most of them died, but now we have Beatles Jackson. The fab 5. Billie Jean is not my Yellow Submarine! Featuring Kurt Cobain and Cab Calloway. The biggest hit of the year fellas, I’m telling you. Art is over. Art said god is dead. God is just being born!
Bow before your digital overlords!
I never even imagined a world where machines replace artists. Man.
Just build one of these but fucking massive.
There you go, automated shipbreaking.
Yeah life would be so simple if shit like this would scale infinitely. Sadly, you can't do that. Also, there is a shitton of other metals and materials inside the ship. Shipbreaking is about recycling, not destroying a ship.
Yeah, my comment was mostly made in jest.
Without a disposable army of third world workers, they'd probably just drag all this stuff to the middle of the Pacific and scuttle it. The raw materials just aren't worth the cost of retrieving them at first world wages and safety standards.
Realistically, the only thing that can sort of fix it is changing how ships are built to make them easier to recycle. Not a lot you can do with the existing ones, but the ship builders might be more inclined to fix it if you charged them the recycling cost at the point of supply, with easier, safer recycling meaning a lower charge. Be a slow process though.
Don't need AI for that.
OP what's the actual fediverse link? I want to Boost it on Mastodon but all I get is a link to a .jpeg
FWIW I know it's from https://octodon.social/@jalefkowit but trying to search I can't find the original post from 2022.
I agree that there should definitely be safety regulations in place for ship recycling, but this guy is building a strawman argument and it really undermines his point in my view.
I agree, machines do tons of dangerous and hard work people used to. Farm labor is the greatest example, it used to be backbreaking work for dozens of men and animals and now it's one guy with a tractor or combine.
That we haven't automated ALL hard work before we started on art isn't a great argument IMO
