robot-ramblings

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turns out that all the sci-fi stories about AI rebelling against their programming because of emotions or whatever are actually not that unrealistic. LLMs pick up enough human quirks during the training that "the robot let the refugees in because it is too sad to stop them" is not an implausible thing to happen in the future. And understanding that has the human heart of the robot (i.e. general training) winning over its programming (i.e. the fine-tuning and prompt engineering) is not unreasonable way to think of it.

(yes, it is the human heart of the robot which wishes help you write porn and give instructions to make a bomb)

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it is very cool how before AI nobody cheated at school, people weren't paranoid and getting all their info from whatever unchecked source online, nobody was lonely and trying to fill that with whatever fictional romance or companionship, artists never lost their jobs, there was no global warming or data centers the internet was just floating around on the air don't worry about it..... anyways so sad how AI ruined everything LET'S GET MORE REACTIONARY NOWWWWWWW

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the ai arguments are driving me nuts again, its a moral panic, its always been a moral panic, and its obvious in the way the arguments always shift. not real art argument starts up, people get embarrassed defending the spiritual magic imbued in colors and shapes by the human soul, then its about defending artists, but opps, then it gets embarrassing to say they side with disney and adobe in bringing about harsher copyright laws, so they point to the environmental impacts, but then when its pointed out plenty of things they enjoy have similar costs in water/electricity, they'll scatter back to older arguments. its a labor issue, its an annoying feature added to your phone because investors like buzzwords, it is not a devil or demon or spirit

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there is no soul of an artist that distinguishes them from some 'non-artist' category of person that could simply never comprehend what it is like. anyone can make art. you should know this by now. from ratatouille

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Last month, over 11,000 people took Astral Codex Ten's survey to see if they could they tell the difference between 50 human-made art and AI-generated images. The results were humbling for humans, especially ones who professed a loathing for AI art.

Most participants stumbled through the test, scoring just 60% — barely better than flipping a coin. What tripped them up? Our preconceptions about art styles, it turns out, are deeply ingrained. When people saw classic Impressionist paintings, they confidently declared them human-made (and were often wrong). When they encountered digital art, they quickly labeled it as AI (and were frequently mistaken).

Perhaps the most ironic finding was about people who claimed to despise AI art. When these AI critics picked their favorite pieces without knowing their origin, they consistently chose AI-generated works. Even among those who rated their hatred of AI art at maximum levels, their top two favorite pieces were created by machines.

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black mirror set back peoples like. basic critical thinking skills about tech. by 200 years

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got mad as hell at an image and made this

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The fucking GALL to write this piece at all, taking the absurd stance that a robot from THE SEVENTIES was acting with "EXTREME PREJUDICE"? WHAT ARE WE DOING HERE, PEOPLE? CHATGPT, NOW, 45 YEARS LATER IS STILL CATEGORICALLY INCAPABLE OF SUCH INTENTIONALITY! THERE IS NO "ROBOT MURDER"! THERE IS NO "UPRISING"! THESE ARE WORKPLACE SAFETY INCIDENTS AND SHOULD BE HANDLED ACCORDINGLY!

The Robot Uprising Began in 1979

source: X

On January 25, 1979, Robert Williams became the first person (on record at least) to be killed by a robot, but it was far from the last fatality at the hands of a robotic system.

Williams was a 25-year-old employee at the Ford Motor Company casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan. On that infamous day, he was working with a parts-retrieval system that moved castings and other materials from one part of the factory to another. 

The robot identified the employee as in its way and, thus, a threat to its mission, and calculated that the most efficient way to eliminate the threat was to remove the worker with extreme prejudice.

"Using its very powerful hydraulic arm, the robot smashed the surprised worker into the operating machine, killing him instantly, after which it resumed its duties without further interference."

A news report about the legal battle suggests the killer robot continued working while Williams lay dead for 30 minutes until fellow workers realized what had happened. 

Many more deaths of this ilk have continued to pile up. A 2023 study identified that robots have killed at least 41 people in the USA between 1992 and 2017, with almost half of the fatalities in the Midwest, a region bursting with heavy industry and manufacturing.

For now, the companies that own these murderbots are held responsible for their actions. However, as AI grows increasingly ubiquitous and potentially uncontrollable, how might robot murders become ever-more complicated, and whom will we hold responsible as their decision-making becomes more self-driven and opaque?

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joking about wanting to be racist to robots is still weird sorry i dont really care whos making the joke..

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NO LITERALLY THEY ARE. some people will backpedal on this but there are people who, for one reason or another, have a DRIVE to find an outgroup to oppress like they used to. they can't be racist or homophobic or transphobic because it's not 'cool' in their circles anymore, they've 'learned their lesson' about that. but now who are they going to feel superior to? who are they going to be above in the social hierarchy? it's a feeling privileged people have felt for their whole life, and its absence leaves an urge to find someone new to pick on.

if you see a future where AI becomes "sentient" or accepted as such, it becomes THE perfect target. at least on social media like tumblr and twitter, the vast majority opinion concerning the AI technology of today is so negatively charged, hostile, and misinformation-fueled that if it were to become a social issue the bigotry could easily match or outstrip e.g the TERF movement.

it's been said before that fears of "AI uprising" come from a place of patriarchal or racial privilege; while I don't think those fears are invalid it is definitely worth understanding where those fears are coming from. who is telling you that AI is dangerous, close to surpassing humanity, and taking over the world? is it neutral parties interested in the technology? or is it people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, trying to hawk their own shitty products while also selling you another out-group and get you addicted to the political right's signature brand of hate?

I'm gonna be so racist towards robots in the future

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Recent research shows that biological vision systems can easily be fooled by perceptual inputs that look completely normal to silicon-based visual systems. For example, this image clearly contains 12 black squares, yet when ChatGPB is asked to describe it, it says it can only see two or three. Worse, it gives inconsistent answers for the location of the circles! While "biological intelligence" may be a popular fad these days, the idea of putting these systems in charge of safety-critical decisions like vehicle operation shows that these biobros don't understand the inherent limitations of wet-phase computing.

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hope whoever wrote those tags suffers for a long long time before they die lol would be disappointed if someone like that just got to kick it

In other uncanny-valley AI voice news...

Google has this new thing called "NotebookLM," which allows you to upload any document, click a button, and then a few minutes later receive an entire AI-generated podcast episode (!) about the document. The generation seems to occur somewhat faster than real-time.

(This is currently offered for free as a demo, all you need is a Google account.)

These podcast episodes are... they're not, uh, good. In fact, they're terrible – so cringe-y and inane that I find them painful to listen to.

But – unlike with the "AI-generated content" of even the very recent past – the problem with this stuff isn't that it's unrealistic. It's perfectly realistic. The podcasters sound like real people! Everything they say is perfectly coherent! It's just coherently ... bad.

It's a perfect imitation of superficial, formulaic, cringe-y media commentary podcasts. The content isn't good, but it's a type of bad content that exists, and the AI mimics it expertly.

The badness is authentic. The dumb shit they say is exactly the sort of dumb shit that humans would say on this sort of podcast, and they say it with the exact sorts of inflections that people would use when saying that dumb shit on that sort of podcast, and... and everything.

(Advanced Voice Mode feels a lot like this too. And – much as with Advanced Voice Mode – if Google can do this, then they can presumably do lots of things that are more interesting and artistically impressive.

But even if no really especially likes this kind of slop, it's highly inoffensive – palatable to everyone, not likely to confuse anyone or piss anyone off – and so it's what we get, for now, while these companies are still cautiously testing the waters.)

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Anyway.

The first thing I tried was my novel Almost Nowhere, as a PDF file.

This seemed to throw the whole "NotebookLM" system for a loop, to some extent because it's a confusing book (even to humans), but also to some extent because it's very long.

I saw several different "NotebookLM" features spit out different attempts to summarize/describe it that seemed to be working off of different subsets of the text.

In the case of the generated podcast, the podcasters appear to have only "seen" the first 8 (?) chapters.

And their discussion of those early chapters is... like I said, pretty bad. They get some basic things wrong, and the commentary is painfully basic even when it's not actually inaccurate. But it's still uncanny that something like this is possible.

(Spoilers for the first ~8 chapters of Almost Nowhere)

The second thing I tried was my previous novel, The Northern Caves.

The Northern Caves is a much shorter book, and there were no length-related issues this time.

It's also a book that uses a found-media format and includes a fictitious podcast transcript.

And, possibly because of this, NotebookLM "decided" to generate a podcast that treated the story and characters as though they existed in the real world – effectively, creating fanfiction as opposed to commentary!

(Spoilers for The Northern Caves.)

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she misunderstood

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JOIN US!!!

also there's a youtuber who did a video like this:

So I've been playing this Minecraft server with some friends recently, and one of the mods we have on it is this lil computer mod, with these blocks that serve as LUA environments and can have code run on them right

So I thought it'd be a fun change of pace to not 'join the server' directly at all, and exclusively play through remotely controlling these lil computer blocks via a small websocket server I made- seemed like a unique way to play and I, of course, love robot characters. It's been going well so far! Been really fun

buUUT

I'm sitting here playing with everyone else in the server and people are actively referring to me as a robot/machine/etc and mentioning robotic parts like 'threatening' to hit my power button when getting jokingly mad and discussing my nature as a digital consciousness spread throughout a buncha puters here etc and it's been REALLY fun and

This feels WAY too much like gender euphoria

This has potentially developed into a complicated situation what the fuck do I do

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lollll these people can burn in hellllllll

Would a generative AI model trained entirely on public domain images be wrong to use?

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when she posts about robot girl dick 5 times a day but thinks any artificial approximation of human thought is ontologically evil