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.
Compliance non compliance.
I’ve worked on the part of the pipeline that annotates the type of videos you would record. Things like cleaning the data or marking down what the machines are doing.
Contrary to what others have said, it would be difficult to poison the dataset. Training data works in aggregates. Anything you do out of the ordinary will be flagged by the human annotators or the automated systems looking for deviations from the norm.
Many people are already doing what you’ve been offered. Their data is already being processed and fed into LLMs. They want as much data as they can get. That’s why they’re paying so much to every professional in the world right now.
I honestly don’t know how one might sabotage the system but it’s not as easy as you all think. The militantly anti-AI crowd likes to think of LLMs as more incapable than it actually is. The systems will spot obvious things like randomly tabbing and spinning the cursor. AI is better than that now. Human annotators will flag those easily as junk data too.
I’ve faced as similar dilemma as you. I need money so I did that job even though I hated it. I’ve seen obvious acts of attempted sabotage in the data. We get penalized for not spotting these things, even as bottom rung data cleaning peons.
I wouldn’t waste my time trying basic trickery. This is like day 1 stuff they tell us to look out for. Also you will immediately be noticed and fired for giving them junk data.
Logically the next thought might be to insert some high level errors that only the top experts could spot. I honestly don’t know if this even works, but I doubt it. They have experts in the pipeline too. So you might end up giving them data about errors that only experts could spot. That would only make their dataset even better.
Thank you for an insight from someone that actually seems to understand what’s going on. My stomach twisted and turned as I signed a contract for General Dynamics because I had to eat. They won’t let you poison it because they need a measurable good part or assembly at the end of it. Small changes can easily affect small tolerances. “Oh just do it sloppily!” absolutely does not hold up to scrutiny when they have CMMs measuring what you’ve done vs. what they see. If I have to hold a good tolerance of 0.002" they will measure and with that along with finishes etc. they will know it is not up to snuff.
They have multiple people annotating the same video. They look for discrepancies in how data is annotated between people. Probably most often it’s annotator error. It also allows them to spot actual oddities that maybe only one person noticed. There’s a lot of redundancies. I think some might have a conception of AI-bros recklessly feed raw data into LLMs and sell people the garbage-out machine. It’s not that at all. The source content and the written records are validated. It goes through refinement again and again to check. Who knows how many times. I’ve gotten by own annotations back at much later stages for further verification. That comes after even more people have looked at it and done whatever their assignment was with the data.
This inherently has nothing to do with AI. It’s mass data harvesting and refinement. It’s bigger than LLMs. Whatever technologies supersede LLMs will be fed these datasets. If they do it right once, they’ll never need you or any professional ever again regardless of whether LLMs ultimately flop. They won’t need you for the next iteration of AI technology. In theory of course.
The business here isn’t AI. It’s what big tech has always been after. Data.
Even if you get fired you wasted their time and made some money. Just have another job ready.
Introducing high level errors costs lots of money. The later in the pipeline stuff gets noticed, the worse it gets.
Don’t listen to someone telling you to not listen to other people. I’m a level 69 LLM wizard and clearly outrank the guy annotating stuff. I never faced his dilemma because I’m so far into the ass of AI companies that they ask me to polish their plumbobs.
Jokes aside.
Poison the data. Get money.
You won’t significantly poison the model, but you’ll make it more expensive to train.
If it needs to be flagged it doesn’t enter the dataset. LLMs can’t be fed with errors, they’re regurgitation machines, not thinking machines.
The things that could be made better by you are adversarial networks, which can punish the LLMs in reinforcement learning but there’s an inevitable glass ceiling of model collapse in any case. These slop machines will always make errors, the broader you want them to get – that’s their nature. Nobody is doing AI right nowadays, in 95% of cases they’re just bumbling idiots in a gold rush.
Some errors will always slip through. The more insidious your errors are, the harder to spot they are, the higher the chance they won’t notice.
Do your worst.
The thing is though, when I say they need physical products as a result, they will be measuring them with a CMM (Coordinate Measuring Machine) that not only takes very accurate measurements, but also surface finish. I can’t do both incorrectly - ever. Also, see my update: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/61854279
Can you make it take ages without the surface finish? Can you make the tools break after 2 or 3 of these? Or have very high wear and tear on the machine? Obviously not killing your own machine…
Do it but do it poorly. Don’t show your expertise, teach it that noob shit.
Someone will do it. 100%
Why not you?
Take the job, do a mediocre job good enough not to get fired, bad enough to limit their take, keep searching for better work. If you find anything livable, take it.
Don’t kill yourself over abstaining from what other people are going to do, but do your best to exit the space asap.
Hell, start a website and take side work, perhaps?
Get an old Power Wheels car, remake the gearbox out of something durable, and market it to the Power Wheels overclockers.
Offer replacement parts for older 3d printers, most of the 3d files are available and 99% of the work is knowing how to get your machine to make them.
Light Metal iphone cases with Cthulhu/F1/Star Trek/Star Wars relief cut into the back.
Search out cosplay, replica items if you have weathering skills.
Start a youtube machining channel with videos of you doing all that shit. Youtube will pay you to have people watch it and people will buy the items off you. Also post them to TT and IG.
Just going to point out that putting their expertise on youtube is pretty much the same end route. Except now google can just train on it from there.
Watching someone is very different from learning, trying it myself ,failing and knowing why something works, or didn’t work.
Someone watching lots of porn doesn’t automatically mean he is good in bed.
A YouTube video of someone cutting chips on a CNC does absolutely nothing for training. They can’t just watch the mill cut without precise measurements. What they need is what he knows about machining. They’re interested in him taking in a spec, building it in CAD, generating a program from it, why he chooses what he chooses, speeds, angles, what’s possible, what’s not possible. None of this is required for his own YouTube video. Clean up the mill, get the lights good, and just let people watch it fly.
He’s not putting his expertise into Youtube, he’s just showing you the piece being made, jump cuts around working with the model. Hell, showing failures. There’s a damned strong following for speechless videos of machinists/engineers doing work.
The real upside: say he’s making phone cases, keychains, parts; people will go to his site and buy that shit. He doesn’t have to give the baby away with the bathwater.
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.
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.
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 (?)
This will be filtered by low level data cleaners. You need more insidious errors like too high speeds or pressures which makes tools fail, not even spotted by expert machinists. The later in the training pipeline this stuff is caught, the more expensive it is, and the better you can claim that you’re just bad at machining. If only an expert can spot it, surely it’s not malicious compliance!
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.
People will tell you don’t do it but you can’t completely isolate yourself from contributing to damagas 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.
respectively fuck off
Oh you seem very balanced and zen. Miss capitalism yet? 🙃
Cursing = bad people are so weird. Do you think I’m unhappy when I say fuck? I love saying fuck it’s awesome lol
Also no I literally don’t! I stopped looking for work in August and my life has been on an upward tick. I’m self harming less, my marriage is improving and I’ve been getting in a LOT of my bucket list. I’ve also been feeling really strong and like I’m putting my whole self out there.
So yeah!
I am sorry, I hope you find an occupation that is to your liking and holds up to your standards. Give everyone who choose 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.
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.
The irony is that CNC did this to the guys who manually worked milling machines and turned lathes.
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
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
I remember when copywriters went through this exact same scenario like a year and a half ago.
Proposal: ban OP if they accept
Why?
Was not a serious comment.
yeah…fuck AI…but also fuck you for not identifying that OPs problem isn’t just their problem. it’s the whole reason why this community exists.
There’s also the practical thing that OP has to eat.
Banning them is hardly going to solve the issue if the choice is training AI or starvation.
