I am ethically and morally opposed to gen AI as a concept. As far as the breaking point, let me explain. I’ve been a machinist for ~18 years. It’s been really bad for the last 9 years and I’ve more or less had to live off of savings from the good years (those savings are basically gone).
I’ve just recently gotten legitimate job offers for ~$125 an hour remote because I own a CNC. The catch is that I have to record all of the CAM programming and machine time in order to train an AI to replace potentially hundreds of thousands of jobs.
This fucking sucks. I’d love to sit on my ass forever at 43, but I absolutely fucking hate the potential that I could bring that would crush the working class and elevate the owning class.
I wish it wasn’t this hard, because I really do believe in socialism and have labored hard for a long time to make it happen - but there’s a chance I can put everything I have into true anarchism cause and make a legitimate difference.
Please help.
Sounds like a perfect opportunity to poison the AI in inconspicuous ways, my friend.
Im just saying, you could spearhead a revolution and make dough at the same time.
I sincerely recommend that you seek out other income sources. Here’s my main suggestion: Inform people you know that you own a CNC and can machine parts. Ask those people to inform others that they know and distribute your business contact information. Word-of-mouth advertising is free, and friends of friends expand exponentially.
If you cannot find any other income sources and truly have absolutely no other recourse, accept but immediately join a union and request a strike over the AI use. If you have to work for this company, employ malicious compliance like data poisoning. Consider whether you may be able to claim moral or religious exemption to the use of AI. This has worked in other places for humanists and, if I recall correctly, Catholic. You can sue them for denying you that exemption if they refuse.
If you have already taken the job or must do it, do me a favor and spin the mouse and tab around unusually while doing your task. Just subtle malicious compliance is probably enough to fuck up the training (?)
The irony is that CNC did this to the guys who manually worked milling machines and turned lathes.
Do it, and then after you get paid, release all the programming and machine time recordings online into the public domain. Then at the very least, it might be used to train an open-source AI model that anyone can use. Or better yet, collaborate with the folks working on the FreeCAD CAM workbench and get the ball rolling yourself if you think this sort of AI CAM thing is feasible.
Their catch is they’ll say your footage isn’t suitable for training and will only pay for a small portion that they claim can be used for training
People will tell you don’t do it but you can’t completely isolate yourself from contributing to damages of aggressive capitalism unless you live in a cave. You buy detergent? Some of that money likely goes to a shareholder who also has AI stocks or invests money in military technologies that are sold to Israel for genocide. Anyone who says don’t do it haven’t really thought this through. Many people here likely curse Jeff Bezos but use amazon for the convenience of it or curse google and use google maps etc. Yours is atleast a genuine survival issue. If you can keep doing this for a year with some subtle level of malicious compliance you might feel better about it. Just make sure they will hold their end of the bargain.
It is like the anti car people. That is great if you live in a dense city with public transportation but the majority of the people are looking at struggles to do basic tasks, like buying food, and getting to work without a car.
This person is the devil on your shoulder. I quit doing things like applying to corporate slums and my life improved drastically. Like an unreal amount within months my mental health has skyrocketed. Trust me, it’s better to just quit your job and support the people you like. A LOT of people will be mad but it will get easier to let it fall right off your back.
If a person says they have been having a very hard time for almost a decade because of job difficulties, you should perhaps consider the situation in that context and point of view rather than the black and white holier than thou approaches. I agree that the ideal point to go to is to isolate your-self from aggressive capitalism as much as possible but for each person the sensible steps to get closer to this is different.
I’ve been unemployed since 2022, respectively fuck off with an argument that bad faith.
I am sorry, I hope you find an occupation that is to your liking and holds up to your standards. Give everyone who chooses to step away from aggressive capitalism the chance to contribute in their own way and do not try push the “I did it like this so should you”. Someone else will always come and find things they do better than you which you won’t be able to really fix in your context and getting shat on for that doesn’t help anyone but provide temporary relief on the side of the shitter. For people who are brave enough to give up a majority of their life and go through major difficulties to distance themselves from all this, I feel respect. But that won’t work wonders on everyone. So better they stay sane and contribute less but in their own way.
Just do it wrong. Half ass the fuck out of it and milk it for what you can before they catch on. Fuck those pigs
Someone asks when I’m already broke and supporting a friend. Try a GoFund me, what can I say, ask mods to let you link your GoFund me here.
I remember when copywriters went through this exact same scenario like a year and a half ago.
poison the data
This is the way. Contaminate it all. If AI will kill us all, better it be born of our own contaminated hatred for the owners of the means of production.
Based
My thoughts exactly.
My dad was a machinist. I know automation for their jobs is highly desired. In an ideal socialist world, we would need experts to automate everything for us anyway, so the work you do is laying the ground work for that future to exist; we know it’s going to be misused, I would say do it, document things as best you can for the next generation in a common book you keep to yourself.
Additionally, we know AI is pretty shit, Its more likely there will be a robotics breakthrough that will get people there. I think if you go in and get paid, and keep your eyes open for ways to sabotage the data set. (Being inefficient or bad at your job is a way to keep the gig going as long as possible)… there’s hope.
Someone is going to do it if you decline. I admire your principles but you have to eat… take the job, stay healthy, we’ll need you to help us fight the inevitable rise of the machines.
I really wanted to work the phrase G-Code Virus in there too, but I got nothing.
AI video editor is still needed for the podcast I turned down. You would do it because you are a shill but that’s not provable.
Show me the data!!
It really sucks. I hate it, but you’re probably right. I have no family at all, and even if it is a 1 year contract I can live for years off of $300k
Someone else will be a Nazi if you decline. Does that sound reasonable?
That other person will be a Nazi if you accept, too. The job only goes to a finite number of people.
Stop that. You are on the same side and you’re both right. We need to fight as a group, not individually.
Yes and fighting is not “you might as well do it tbh”
Telling a man not to put food on his table is not a winning strategy.
Selling your values to the money-havers is not a winning strategy.
So you do not use up any fossil fuels? Only buying from anarchist co-ops? No Supermarkets for you? Only second hand clothing? O course your vegan too? And i really hope you don’t pay rent to anyone!
EVERYONE is aiding the 1% there is no way not to. How convinient that YOUR support is morally fine and you are wise enough to judge others without actually knowing a damn thing.
This is NOT how to build community, this is not how you get enough people to vote left(you know the thing that we ACTUALLY need to change something) this is one major reason why peoole think the left is a joke.
Automation is coming no matter what and it isn’t a problem when we manage to make left wing policies popular enough to run on and win, so we can tax the shit out of these companies and give the money back to the people in various forms.
Just stop with the blame game, ops decision does not make a difference at all for AI but he will not be more useful living on the street .
Is your dream for the future that everyone keeps being a wage slave ? Why not bring down all automation we had so far than?
Are you dumb? This time it is not about aiding wealthy. He is going to take bread from poor. Do you get it now? Tell me if not, I will try to explain you like you are five
Genuinely working on all of those things yeah! About to upgrade to an electric car actually lol. It’s not perfect but me and my partner do try. I think you personally value your comfort a lot more than the safety and happiness of other people. There is in fact plenty of survival out there for the jobless and underemployed, in fact life improves!
lol good one
No, i will not stop. Building community wont fix this disaster world and everyone who perpetuates it should be relentlessly bullied.
Also: you’re not working to build community with me so now I’m going to actively work against your interests 🥺🥺🥺 LOL
Godwin’s Law in record time. Principles mean nothing if you’re starving to death on the street. Better to get your piece and put it to good work.
They’re not starving though
You’re not thinking 4th dimensionally
Burning through savings and 43 equals food insecurity coming around the corner, or doing other shitty odd jobs.
They’re using Uber and door dash data to train ai too.
It wouldn’t be the internet if someone didn’t pull this one off the shelf. 👏
All those ancient VCRs waking up to record static…
Clocks still blinking 12:00 😉
You can take the $125 and poison their data by making a few mistakes every time. Just do it as inefficiently as possible, as you’re billed by the hour. You’ll make more money and they’ll have more work and less useful data.
Sure, by an ethical/moral standpoint that works. From the legal standpoint, however, if I did that I’d be sued to the point where I have no option but to live out my life in prison. This kind of thing sounds great on paper. In practice? I’m not fucking going back.
You cannot be sued for doing your job badly. That’s insane lol
In the US at least (which sounds like the OP’s country), you can be sued for anything and everything, regardless of merit.
Why are you so scared? Don’t sign a contract which tells you to do it as efficiently as possible. Just be incompetent. It’s not illegal to be incompetent. Mark Zuckerberg wasted 1 billion dollars with his Metaverse shit and he’s still one of the most powerful and wealthy CEOs.
That’s called “weaponised incompetence” or “malicious compliance”. If you do it right, they don’t have any basis to sue you. Just fake it. Imagine you’re just very bad at your job.
Capitalism often controls through fear. The fear of being sacked. The fear of being sued. In the end, the consequences for being bad are not as painful as you’d imagine.
Iwish I could bring myself to this, but I actually rely give a fuck and have some pride in what I do. I wish I wasn’t principled, but I spent years as an apprentice to get to where I am at and I’ll be damned if I put my name on shoddy work.
I’ll be damned if I put my name on shoddy work.
It’s good work, though.
If you do it right, they don’t have any basis to sue you. Just fake it.
Except for this public conversation.
We’re just clowns doing clown things. That’s a different guy they sent the offer to. Why would it be their account?
No one said you’re a good machinist. So you take 0.005 passes rather than 0.020 passes and set your cutting speed lower. Your rational is it saves your tools. No on is saying cut every thing dry. But that would work too.
Way too easy to fix and way too obvious. A competent machinist will fix this by just changing a single value. You have to introduce less obvious and more insidious errors.
But its not to train competent machinists. Odds are good it will be run by minimum wage slaves who know almost nothing about machining. Tfats what the ai is for afterall.
Yes, but if they find out the data is shit, an LLM or another competent machinist can fix it easily. I’d add errors LLMs can’t spot, and humans take long to find.
Data is data. Mistakes are valuable training data.
Do it. A lot of these AI companies are going to go bankrupt. Companies are paying a premium for data on the hope that it’ll make them lots of money, but real world applications do not always follow. A lot of these companies are ill equipped to deliver what they claim.
Even the big AI companies are struggling to match the promised gains versus their costs.
Someone will take the job, so take it. Its basically speculative investors money. Maybe they will succeed maybe they won’t, but you can have the money and need the money.
The models will survive those bankruptcies. The models will get bought up for nothing by the next wave of AI companies - companies that won’t waste money creating new models or planet-scale data centers, but will still let people outsource human, creative work to digital slaves.
If OP takes the job, they should thin about tactics to poison the data set. Systematically add useless moves to the tool paths. Home after every segment. Random speeds. Extra coordinate changes. I’m sure they can think of other bad-but-works processes.
My problem with that is that if I do this correctly, it could mean hundreds of thousands of jobs from people that have potentially spent decades making a trade. It’s harder than just me wanting money.
Then don’t do it correctly. You’re basically doing your peers a favor if you poison the data.
I might get grilled for this point of view…
The car dramatically reduced the demand for horse shoe makers. Perhaps you’re lucky to be on the car side of the equation? Horses are still great, but most people prefer cars.
It’s a good analogy because cars enabled globalism, more exploitation and poisoned billions of people with nitrous oxides, lead and particulates. Cars lead to cancer. We should be on the train side of the equation…
There is no side to be on, people will do the more convinient thing and cars were not obviously that dangerous and there are OBVIOUSLY positives to car use over horses.
Is your argument we should have forsaken any modernity since the first humans?
No, my argument is that humanity should stop doing dumb things when they find out they’re dumb.
