Microblog Memes

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.

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.

"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...

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

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.

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

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.

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."

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:

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.

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

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.

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!

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.

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?

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

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.