Fire in the hole!
If we got all the other socialist progressive benefits of the Star Trek universe, including no billionaires, then I think we’d be a lot less unhappy with generative AI as presented in that world.
How they built it, and what they plan to do with it is a pretty big part of the reason for our anger.
Yeah, if we de-meme it and really want to define it, the difference is Star Trek is a post-scarcity world, so generative AI building things doesn’t take anything away from human artists - it doesn’t affect their livelihoods because their livelihoods are guaranteed.
As always…
We very nearly live in a post scarcity world too. Just all our resources and labor are funneled into the hands of a few wealthy billionaires.
Star Trek is very Utopian. If it operated anything like our dystopian world it would have a lot of scarcity. For instance there is only one earth in Star Trek.
In our timeline it is most billionaires goal to own the whole planet. Then after that 2 planets then hundreds of planets then 1000s of galaxies.
Exactly! I am not anti-ai. I am opposed to corporate controlled, massively polluting, unreliable slop engines that will be used to surveil us and take our jobs without benefitting us in any way.
Depending on the rate of AI we will probably get something to the polity universe version than Star Trek.
Still not as bad but could be better
Artificial intelligence in science fiction is intelligence that’s artificial.
Artificial intelligence in real life is more akin to what we’d call “artificial flavors” in some fruit drink that contains 0% fruit. Isn’t fruit, doesn’t taste like fruit, but it’s purple and sweet, so fuck it: “grape”. We’ve accomplished the “artificial” part, but not the bit that actually matters.
So, yeah, AI in sci-fi is unironically great. “AI” irl is shit. If the real version ever comes close to the sci-fi version, you’ll see a lot of the haters change our tune, but until then we’ll call a turd a turd.
OK, but how will we ever get to “great” AI if we don’t invest in less great AI to drive research. If the luddites on Lemmy calls the shots, Data will never see the light of day.
“research” doesn’t need billions of dollars in commercial data centres. The shitty “ai” we have is all about line must go up.
Well, rolling with the artificial flavors analogy, we can start by stopping the infuriating trend of adding artificial grape flavor to every fucking food item under the sun. No one asked for or wanted that shit, but now it’s become a chore to find so much as a bag of coffee beans that doesn’t have some blip on the packaging advertising “Now with grape!!” Not only does it taste bad, but it’s caused the cost of food to fucking double.
Second, we can start being honest about what it actually is. Again, it doesn’t taste like grape, so why the fuck are we calling it grape? With AI this is as much on us as it is with the companies marketing that garbage - for ages we’ve been calling so much as an NPC’s pathing algorithm in a videogame “AI” even though there’s objectively no intelligence at play. We’ve since tried to move the goal posts a bit by relabeling actual AI as “AGI” but I guarantee that’ll just become another term to muddy the waters with marketing bullshit. The shit we’re calling “AI” is just categorically not even on the same path as the the kind of AI we see in sci-fi. So if you want Data to see the light of day, we’ll need to stop wasting our time and money on what is effectively a spell checker that’s wrong occasionally.
Unless you think Data is just a chat bot with no consciousness, in which case, hooray, we’ve done it: AI. 🎉 …now can I please have a mug of coffee without Grape™ syrup in it? I know, such a Luddite, drinking coffee without grape! Guilty as charged. But adding that shit to my coffee is never going to get us a product that tastes and feels etc like a grape, so if that’s what you’re after, maybe keep it in R&D and off the fucking grocery shelves.
Why on Earth would we want to build anything even close to Data from Star Trek under these conditions?!
No matter how you slice it, we’d be trapping them in a living hell!
Star Trek’s universe: Federation citizens live in essentially zero scarcity where labor is optional and people can dedicate their lives to basically anything they like that this within their capabilities.
Star Trek’s AI: A typically flawless tool (when the plot doesn’t require an incident), optionally used by the individual, to perform complex calculations, simulations or provide immersion entertainment, complimenting whatever task needs done.
Our universe: We live in a capitalist society where the survival of 95% of the population requires them to sell their labor, where the majority of the population works in any job(s) they can get to make ends meet, where working in a creative or intellectually fulfilling field is a rare blessing and prohibitive to most, where your capitalist overlords claim the majority of your productivity for themselves and see the wages they do pay you as a burden to them that should be minimized regardless of your well-being.
Our AI: Devalues or replaces creative and intellectual roles. Forced down the throats of workers and consumers. Used to collectively monitor everyone. Used to push more wealth to a concentrated few. Notably and constantly unreliable while given unearned trust. Not actually intelligent, just good at specific kinds of prediction and parroting based on training from real works from real people that was stolen without the consent of the creators to be fed into the machines to be plagiarized on request. A genuine risk to the stability of our economy. A nightmare for the mental health of children and those vulnerable to delusions and/or thoughts of self-harm. Increasingly used to replace thought and skill development making us collectively dumber and more reliant on it.
Perhaps OP is suggesting that if holodecks really were as powerful as the show suggests, they would have a much larger impact on the star trek universe than what is shown
I would argue star treks AI is constantly going wrong, and the fact that it can create objects which can actually harm you, is taken with a grain of salt by them.
Holodecks are incredibly dangerous, easily hacked, and the holo style workers they they, like the doctor on Voyager, will IMMEDIATELY TURN EVIL WHEN ANYTHING TOUCHES THEIR ETHICS SUBROUTINES!
Their use is AI should be terrifying to us.
“Make an opponent capable of defeating Data”
ST AI: Have a supercharged Moriarty.
RL AI: deletes production database
Star Trek is also a post scarcity society and they aren’t using water to run the models. IP ownership in the Federation is still a thing though, so long as the genAI isn’t using copyrighted material, it’s fine.
bet they aren’t built on LLMs either
There are a few episodes where various people mention putting a lot of time and wish into building holodeck sims. I’m guessing it’s more like having a futuristic version of Unity/UnrealE/etc, with a common asset pool and an AI assisted interface
don’t care. the future isn’t llms.
For budgetary reason, they’re never that outlandish or creative sets, but I really liked the irony of the Captain Proton being a reoccurring thing
I mean you can also run a generative modal locally using green energy, but try going into fuckai and telling them that.
You can run it at home on your own local machine using solar power.
well yeah, some people care about the entire shit being built on theft. why wouldn’t you care about that?
oh they didn’t steal from you. that’s why you don’t care.
It doesn’t have to be built on theft. And what are your thoughts on piracy?
it doesn’t have to, but it always seems to be lol.
book eating, literally stealing texts from future generations to feed llms.
my thoughts on piracy? I don’t pirate shit. And I certainly don’t rip off entire chunks of humanity - the painters, musicians, authors etc., wholescale like llms do.
you really just assume everyone is stealing therefor it’s ok? how sad.
You’re on Lemmy mate, don’t bs me and tell me you think most people here don’t pirate. People here will downvote you for calling piracy theft but then upvote you for accusing llms of stealing.
And have you never downloaded a picture for a wallpaper, or to repost, send to friends, etc? Because that is equivalent to someone using a local model to do things. We are not talking large scale models, which seems to be what you keep shifting the conversation to. Anyway I’m tired if of this conversation, good bye.
They are just going to start discussing the ethics of stolen training data
- What are their thoughts on piracy?
- Have they ever saved an image they saw online to use in a different place (wallpaper, repost the meme, etc.)? What is so different from someone using it to train their own model which they use for themselves?
It’s a good thing that what kind of energy it runs on is the only problem with the technology and that we can cheaply generate the necessary amount of power at home.
I mean, you certainly don’t need any more energy than you would for video games, for most of the stuff people are looking to use at home.
It is possible to generate it, but even if someone can’t, I don’t see the fuckai people yelling at game Devs for increasing requirements for so little gain, or at GPU Devs for not focusing enough on the draw power of GPUs. In fact, just 1 or 2 years ago I think, NVIDIA released a GPU generation that was only a little more powerful but had a lot more energy efficiency, and they got shat on by the internet because it wasn’t powerful enough - no cared about the lower power draw.
oh yeah running a rack of gpus full out for inference and whatnot is exactly like playing some games.
buuuullll SHIT.
Also, tons of people have complained about the increasing power requirements of increasingly large GPUs, the increasing hardware demands of “AAA” games despite the low quality, etc… An entire universe of indie games has emerged in part because of that bullshit.
the increasing power requirements of increasingly large GPUs
yup - a friend of mine has a dead 3080 - nvidia did not do a good job designing those power connectors.
“Tons of people”
I was one of those people, on Lemmy, and I’m telling you first hand the vast majority of people did not give a shit, they just wanted a more powerful GPU
You don’t need all that to run local morals, don’t straw man me.
local morals
lol. I know you mean local models, but also I suspect your local morals are lacking too considering the other comment.
the inference and model construction take grunt bud; just because you’re not doing it yourself doesn’t make it free.
No it doesn’t, you are arguing in ignoring and this is pointless. Have a good one.
The part about using real actors and people in simulated performances in movies after they’re dead is the same in holodeck and current cg/ai. Stephen Hawking was used, the real person consented to be on the tv show but the in show historical figure did not.
There’s a difference between making a movie about an actor or other famous person and inserting an actor’s likeness into a movie that didn’t need it. If you become part of the cultural zeitgeist, people will talk about you. For an historic example of using someone’s likeness to sell a movie, you can look at Plan 9 from Outer Space and using footage of Bela Lugosi after he had died. That’s still considered bad taste. A new example is using including Tupac Shakur in the new Yakuza game AI or not, people aren’t exactly excited, but we’ll see what they do with it. Probably shouldn’t have used him in the trailer at least. There’s some gray areas with legacy characters in an on going franchise and whether or not you can find a look alike. I didn’t have a big issue with Tarkin being in Rouge One despite Peter Cushing being dead.
Perhaps we give it a pass in a post-scarcity world? When capitalism isn’t in the picture, it’s not taking jobs or ruining the environment or anything like that.
Although, you kinda still have to “write” a holodeck program and it also seems to be slightly harder than prompting or they’d be doing it on the fly a bit more.
Meh I thought the holodeck was mostly a writer’s crutch and an excuse to loot the Paramount lot for period costumes.
The holodeck is better than having an ancestral Irish cottage in some random village on a colony planet somewhere.
Fair enough.
The simplest answer, real world LLMs and AI are real, and holodecks are fictional. Plenty of things are cool in fiction and not something we should actually build.
See the classic tweet about the Torment Nexus.
I mean lots of scifi directly relate holodecksb to a sketchy digital sex trafficking network.
Holodecks are discrete programs with subroutines.
It’s like fiction and reality are two different things.
I fucking hate holodecks.
They are dangerous, psychologically destructive machines that have no place on earth. We have no idea what prolonged exposure to simulated environments does to the human brain. People are spending hours inside fake worlds instead of interacting with reality. Children are probably going to grow up thinking consequences aren’t real because their parents let them spend twelve hours a day fighting robots in a simulated medieval castle.
And don’t even get me started on the fact that the computer can generate literally anything you ask for.
That is not progress. That is an existential threat to society.
So, naturally, I have volunteered to personally test every single holodeck in the world.
Every last one.
I will spend as much time as necessary inside these horrible, dangerous machines so that nobody else has to endure the terrible psychological consequences of using them.
You are welcome.
Thank you for your service.
The hero we need but don’t deserve.
TBF, even on TNG, there were characters who complain about how fake replicator food and synthahol are, and they have whole episodes on Holoaddiction.
Replicator food can be identical but it’s also personally tuned for their nutrition and metabolism. The personal replicators and the bigger ones in ten forward aren’t programmed the same.
Listen here you little shit…
No holodecks, or more accurately, the ship’s computer, are fantasy AI. Chatbots will never be so cool.
There was this old book in my school classroom I remember that was speculating about the future; it had illustrations of robot butlers and maids helping people about the house in that 1960s-painting style. Think the future as seen in “The Jetsons”, or Andrew from “Bicentennial Man”.
That’s the “robot assistance” I was promised. So I’d say to my robot “Hey, can you turn the lights down?” And a humanoid robot would walk over to the light switch and turn the lights down.
Of course, it turns out building robots like that is hugely expensive so it’s easier to just sell smart lights that connect to a voice-activated app on your phone. That’s just not the same as a true general purpose robot, dammit! There’s no whimsy. Generative AI is ruining the Internet and for what? I’m no closer to my true robot butler and flying car than I was 20 years ago.
About as cognitive as “nazis just love their country and people”
