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

[…] 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?

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.

I think the solution for ship breakers is for the job to be a highly paid respectable job with protections. In other words the technology that desperately needs to disrupt this industry is probably… unions

Finally, some fucking sense into all of this.

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!

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.

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)

The argument isn’t against the technology, it’s against the application of that technology.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Nah both are

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 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.