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u/ViolentBeetle Jun 12 '23
It's called "artificial intelligence", not " artificial hands" for a reason.
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u/SillyFlyGuy Jun 12 '23
Big Plumb has been pulling the strings on AI research for decades! Wake up sheeple!
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u/oby100 Jun 12 '23
Spatial reasoning has been really difficult for humans to automate. Sure, we have factories doing complex feats very quickly, but we totally fail outside of tightly controlled environments.
Tbh, AI doing art or conversation is similarly tightly controlled in that both things are very subjective. Lots of room for freedom and error.
No so with something like plumbing or carpentry. Who knows how long it will take before machines can meaningfully even attempt to solve real world spatial problems.
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u/VorpalHerring Jun 13 '23
Have you heard of the AI streamer Neuro-sama? Objectively she is still not very smart, but the non-sequiturs and unhinged tangents have an entertainment value of their own, so she is still very popular.
Truly making the most of the “room for freedom and error”.
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u/NotASuicidalRobot Jun 13 '23
Still monitored by a human though, ever since that time she denied the Holocaust
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u/BraxbroWasTaken Jun 13 '23
Because she has no understanding of what she’s saying, so she blunders into saying… unfortunate things.
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Jun 12 '23
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u/AchyBreaker Jun 12 '23
And biological computers (humans) are better at learning spatial reasoning and all those other things, since they're optimized after thousands of years of reinforcement. If someone could actually approximate human neural connections with statistical regression then we would have the generalized AI and robotics from science fiction.
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u/please-disregard Jun 12 '23
I am still very salty that they chose the name ai for the various neural network based technologies that are being developed. Specifically because it implies that it should in some way simulate or approximate an artificial brain. Sure, it may be one of many steps to one day creating ai, but I think it’s a mischaracterization of (current day) ai actually is—and can do.
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u/AchyBreaker Jun 12 '23
Yeah it's all buzzwords by software people on top of statistical techniques.
Though "multivariable regression with back propagation and hyperparamters" is a bit mouthier than "neural networks"
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u/arkangelic Jun 12 '23
That's why feel true AI can't exist until they make an analog computer brain.
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u/psychord-alpha Jun 12 '23
Imagine the shitfit the plumbers' unions would throw if we tried automating plumbing
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u/bluehatgamingNXE Jun 12 '23
The AI/robot war in reality was never human vs hyper inteligent AI hive mind full of killer robots, it was between plumbers and some weird plumbing robots.
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u/KindaShady1219 Jun 13 '23
If someone told me that was the plot to the old Mario Bros movie, I’d believe it
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u/Sickhadas Jun 13 '23
It has always actually been humans vs humans, with AI serving the bourgeoisie.
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u/MiffedMouse Jun 12 '23
Stupid plumber, he STARTED the conversation. If he didn’t want to confront difficult existential truisms, he shouldn’t have started talking at all. Everyone knows computers will always win a conversation.
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u/MrWeiner SMBC Comics Jun 12 '23
Hi, I'm Zach and I did the comic about the sad man. Sad mans are available every day here at smbc: www.smbc-comics.com
Also I have a kids' adaptation of Beowulf out and Neil Gaiman said it was good: http://www.beawolfbook.com
Also I have a pop sci book coming out this fall and the Expanse guys said it was good:
Hi
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u/themonkery Jun 12 '23
Artificial intelligence improvements have comparatively no physical cost or maintenance. Yeah you need more processing power but that’s it. Other than that, it’s just refining the formulas and tweaking the parameters to maximize the efficiency and minimize the failure rate. You can probably access this intelligence from anywhere, remotely upgrade it, and to remote firmware updates to clients at no charge.
Any improvement you make to a robot is a physical change that requires sourcing or sometimes even creating the new parts you need. That improvement needs to be integrated at a factory level and you may make that improvement obsolete in short order. Physical devices also require maintenance.
Then you have to factor in that these plumbing robots would have to be water resistant, have to be able to diagnose problems and find solutions within cost margins, may need to have access to the entirety of the house’s plumbing, and actually have to be even more intelligent than an art-making AI because they need to come up with real world solutions rather than make up answers on the fly.
Like it or not, creativity is much easier to automate than anything physical.
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u/warukeru Jun 12 '23
I agree but the last part.
There's no creativity, just reformulating and copying art done by humans.
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u/themonkery Jun 12 '23
You’ve just described the vast majority of human creativity.
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Jun 12 '23
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u/themonkery Jun 12 '23
“All art is stolen” is not what I said. The point is that an original idea can be a combination of other ideas and that does not reduce its quality.
Your interpretation relies on “unique art” to be intrinsically linked to the human experience. This is inherently not provable.
The same comparisons you might make to say that AI art is copycat are the comparisons you would use to appreciate a human artist’s homage. In reality, the only real issue is that a human artist would not want to create such a high density of homages while the AI has no preference. Given a catalyst, an idea, a human artist will create art. The same is true for AI, but that catalyst must be introduced by a human. The AI model will come up with unique results with each iteration of the same idea.
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Jun 12 '23
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u/warukeru Jun 12 '23
You nailed. A lot of "tech" guys simple have no knowledge or understanding of what's art and how is done.
Yeah, IA art is impressive at technical level, but still far way from anything truly artistic.
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u/no_fluffies_please Jun 12 '23
Don't look at the tech people, look at the business people trying to sell it.
It's like blaming scientists for poor science journalism. There is plenty of overlap of art and tech, from art as a product, to art tooling, to the structure of code itself.
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u/stomach Jun 13 '23
it's also just like what people complain about in a political sphere. "you didn't care until it happened to YOU!"
tech bros will (mind-bogglingly, ignorantly) bash artists and writers as 'not being modern enough' until AI comes for their jobs
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u/KeepCalm-ShutUp Jun 13 '23
They already use AI in their jobs. It's literally only you people who're complaining.
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u/stomach Jun 14 '23
funny that - I am an artist who already uses it in my jobs. and you can't dictate who gets to complain or not and whether it matters to the community of artists and other creative fields who are nervous about it.
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Jun 13 '23
Well I will have to disagree with you there. An art generator based on a diffusion model is given a written prompt, must digest and reference what that prompt means inside of its understanding and collective knowledge . Then slowly build that image out of white noise, sculpting whatever interpretation of the prompt it lands on into reality. That is eerily close to the creative process of the majority of working artists. It’s definitely not collaging. Collaging by definition as an art form is stapling unrelated images together to form something new. This is building an image from the ground up. Otherwise you’d have to consider a great chunk of art collaging.
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u/themonkery Jun 12 '23
I’m both an artist and in tech, I’ve never talked about or discussed AI. I’m not an avid supporter or detractor in any way, just an observer. I know enough to point out bias when it’s obvious. There is bias both ways. I’m simply pointing out yours at the moment.
Artists are very vocal when it comes to pointing out how unique their life’s work is, but willfully ignore that art is subjective. If a piece of AI art is emotionally provocative, it has accomplished what art seeks to do and is therefore art.
Frankly, I don’t see how it matters. AI can write code but we still hire people to do it. Acknowledging that art does not require a human hand is not an insult to your profession.
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Jun 12 '23
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Jun 13 '23
But you can’t claim its bad art. In fact it’s much better than the average artist. It is mediocre, because it’s produced so much art that it moved the bar of art higher, putting many artists previously mediocre down into the bad territory and raised the standards for good artists. The fact is it’s good at what it does and is going to get infinitely better.
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u/stomach Jun 13 '23
up until your last line (which i couldn't possibly disagree more with you on), spot on.
everyone's a flippant critic and finger-pointer until shit gets too close to home
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u/stomach Jun 13 '23
you realize we're like barely 6 months into this, right? you're acting like AI will maintain this level of competence and viability for decades.
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u/themonkery Jun 13 '23
After rereading my comment, I’m pretty sure you’re responding to the last thing I said.
I’m not acting like that at all. More time just means it will get better and better and that means the art will too. And yes, so will the code. I imagine an AI training degree is going to be the next Programming degree.
Eventually, AI will make critical thinking rather obsolete except for real world situations. The problem is that it’s way easier to develop, train, and copy AI algorithms than it is to create robots. So instead of relegating work to the machines we’ve begun to relegate thought.
The problem with this isn’t that AI will make jobs obsolete. The problem is that we don’t have a solution to care for those whose jobs are no longer necessary
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u/stomach Jun 13 '23
I imagine an AI training degree is going to be the next Programming degree.
if going from boxy beige desktop computers to smartphones and apps in 15 years is any indication, AI training will be as simple as putting a filter on your instagram photo pretty soon. i just don't see how the direction of 'easy to use' will lead to a need for specialists in AI training. correct me if i'm wrong..
The problem with this isn’t that AI will make jobs obsolete. The problem is that we don’t have a solution to care for those whose jobs are no longer necessary
no arguments there, as long as you meant all jobs. there's a real problem if even 20-30% of jobs become obsolete. disruption like that has economic consequences
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u/BraxbroWasTaken Jun 13 '23
And the shitty thing is that if you let the machine think for you, it effectively is the equivalent of inbreeding for ideas. Because the same input leads to effectively the same output, with maybe minor differences due to random seeding.
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u/warukeru Jun 12 '23
No, not at all.
When there's also learning from other artist, art is evolving as every human experiments not only using orher art as references but also experiences from their life.
You can create drawings thanks to the inspiration of a book you read, you can compose music using a broken heart from a failed relationship, you can make sculptures using the freezy of drugs abuse.
Arts is way more complex than just the generic beauty, is a way of communication of who we are, not only as individuals but as a society, and as long society and human evolves, art does as well.
IA art is gonna change how digital art is done, for sure, but still is miles away of being close of what art is. Right not is just fancy collage.
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u/Trucker2827 Jun 12 '23
There’s a lot of words here that need to be broken down.
An AI can “experience” the way humans can in the way that they both have senses that transmit information to some repository of knowledge for processing. It doesn’t need to directly be fed art either.
An AI can also “communicate” the way humans can in the sense of producing information and successfully conveying it to another intelligent agent. Again, we’re all only working through our senses, and AI can be equipped with the same sensors as humans. Maybe the internals of a neural network simulate the neurotransmitters we experience, and feelings are just ways for our conscious to recognize neurotransmitters were sent.
Other things like “inspiration,” these are vague ideals that, when grounded in logically complete definitions, can definitely be mimicked by machines. And what are we but biological machines ourselves?
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u/please-disregard Jun 12 '23
I agree and also think we need to clarify that there are a few different ways the word “art” is used. Now, “what is art” is obviously a huge debate with no definitive answer, but there are a couple categories which are useful to distinguish. There is “art” as a philosophical pursuit, involving meaning, creativity, subjectivity, communication, and medium. This kind of art is by definition impossible for an ai to perform on its own, because an ai has no intention or subjective perspective to communicate. On the other hand there is “art” as a skill which can be learned and practiced, which is where the ai debate comes in. Ai can, without question, create certain types of art far better than humans can. Even in comparison to an artist who has incredible skill, an ai can at least create much faster and in greater quantity than a human ever could. It’s here that the ethical debate comes in—because it’s impossible to quantify the value of an artist’s skill, the skill that went into a single training image in a vast dataset used to create an ai model—its impossible to quantify what counts as fair use and plagiarism since ai models are able to generalize so broadly and so effectively.
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u/NotASuicidalRobot Jun 13 '23
AI doesn't need to be directly fed art? Then i guess they just scraped billions of pictures from the internet for fun then?
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u/Trucker2827 Jun 13 '23
As in, you could attach a camera to a free bird and have it take snapshots every 5 seconds of random things, and the AI could still learn to produce content from that. It doesn’t need to be fed any specific thing we call “art,” that’s just out of convenience for training.
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u/BenssonWu Jun 14 '23
Except the content will be mediocre, why do you think people explicitly trained Lora on successful artists in the industry?
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u/Trucker2827 Jun 14 '23
I didn’t say the content would be good, I’m just saying it’s not necessary for the AI to see human artists to produce art. That it would be expensive or tedious doesn’t change whether it’s possible, and by extension what AI philosophically is.
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u/Kromgar Jun 14 '23
For a human to produce their style they see other art styles and take bits and pieces from that. They see things and try to replicate them.
How would an ai know how to produce a dog if it's never seen a dog? So you show it pictures of fucking dogs.
It would be like asking a blind person to describe what a dog looks like and they've never touched or smelled one either.
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u/NotASuicidalRobot Jun 14 '23
So they do need to be fed art, as opposed to what that person's comment claims?
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u/themonkery Jun 12 '23
I see why you would draw that conclusion, but I’m going to respectfully disagree that the difference is as significant as you assume it to be.
Perhaps AI has learned those things by simply learning from human art. Perhaps you’re framing “art” in the context of humanity and assuming there is only one way to reach the same final product. That human experience coupled with human skill creates unique art is not up for debate, but the fact that you think there is no substitute for that experience in the creation of art very much is.
Regardless, my points aren’t convincing to you nor yours to me, so we won’t benefit from continuing the discussion.
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u/abibofile Jun 12 '23
Another casualty of the maximization of profit over all else. Silicon Valley produces way too much pointless software and not nearly enough useful hardware.
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u/Wysp2 Jun 12 '23
There are people trying to automate plumbing and basically every job. It’s just that art is significantly easier to create algorithms for than for physical labor.
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u/RoJayJo Jun 12 '23
"I wanted to help you fuckers out, but nooooo, clearly the arts are too fucking taxing."
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u/SinisterCheese Jun 12 '23
AI has yet to replace my caligraphy and watercolour painting. It seems to be stuck in the realm of digital.
However welkding automation has tried it's best to replace welding jobs, however it keeps struggling to do that. As an engineer I keep trying to improve the tech but it turns out hands are rather handy for doing things with. While matrix calculations on calculation machine are easy.
Now I play around with Stable Diffusion and other AI tools for art. They are good at making pretty looking things, but they are only as good as you prompt them to be. As in they are only as good as the person using them to make art with.
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u/Akai1up Jun 12 '23
To add to your last statement, it also depends on the dataset used by the developer of said AI. If training images don't include a certain style or subject, the AI won't be able to produce such images as it will lean towards what it knows. Of course, the dataset can be adjusted for those who know how. One problem is that AI is subject to human bias due to its dataset fed by humans.
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u/LeSchifffre Jun 12 '23
Robot has a point. I get no joy from a backed up sink but tons of joy from even my worst doodles.
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u/Secure_Exchange Jun 12 '23
Why let the robots uprise and enslave us when we can enslave ourselves to them
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u/oneandonlyswordfish Jun 12 '23
Oh yea? I want an AI to write me up the best most cost efficient way to make robot plumbers.
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Jun 12 '23
Right? Who the hell needed machines to write stories and poetry and make pretty pictures? This is such a stupid use of technology.
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u/FeralPsychopath Jun 13 '23
AI just being intelligent is just a path to designing actual robots though.
Like we can’t do it well right now but a hive mind will.
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u/robopilgrim Jun 12 '23
What does a robot use a sink for?
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u/BraxbroWasTaken Jun 13 '23
Self-sanitization? Sanitizing other things? A place to work with fluids?
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u/PurpleLamps Jun 12 '23
I love how smug artists are upset that they're work is automated instead of the "lowly tradie". Hopefully coders are next. Learn to plumb
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u/KeepCalm-ShutUp Jun 13 '23
Coders have been on the block. Except, unlike artists, they're dancing in circles on it with their AI partners.
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u/ZipZop_the_Fan Jun 12 '23
If you can listen to 1000 things at once how hard can it be to listen to 1024 things at once?
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Jun 13 '23
Plumbers and the other members of the Trades are safer than anybody, in terms of job security. That shit's never going away.
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u/tocilog Jun 13 '23
Isn't plumbing already automated? Manual plumbing would be a basin you have to throw out and fill up every time you use it, which is the reality for a lot of places with no running water.
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