AI Artbots: Nobody Home

 

1. They are NOT Artificial Intelligence. They are Large Language Models – they have NO intelligence and cannot reason or think. What they do is learn patterns of numbers and repeat those patterns.

The reason they are being called “Artificial Intelligence” is marketing: the spruikers are trying to drum up investor cash to keep their new companies funded until they come up with something that actually makes money.

2. Artbots will not replace human artists. Well, not in the near future. You still need someone to tell the artbot what to “draw” and apply quality checks to what it does.

Yes you can get the artbot to draw nice images that could be photos but they can’t be anything really “original”.Whatever that is.

3. Artbots can’t make content with consistent characters and sets. Yet. Maybe in future. 

If you want a one-shot image of something, fine – but if you want to make a full movie of a character’s adventures the best you can get is that the Artbot will do it all in one go: Reshoots with the same scenes and actors are going to be a problem. This is mainly a problem of the nature of Artbots: it’s all about processing power and memory. In theory if you had enough computing power to devote to this task you could churn out movies directly from a terminal just by typing in commands – but I doubt that they would be very good.

Big computing power costs big money and time on big systems and that means big studios will be the only ones trying that. Maybe the big studios will try to do this but then they won’t be “studios” any more, just server farms. Big ones.

Even if you got the scenes to all be consistent and the actors to be consistent you still need a script.

See below.

4. Artbots can’t write. Well to be exact they don’t write. They can absorb a library of books by human authors and assemble something from, say, five or six of them into a script but once again There is nobody home: you will need a human writer and/or director to read the script and check it to see if it even makes sense let alone makes a good story.

If we are talking movie making it needs to be interesting enough to get people to watch it which is another thing again.

If you want a whole lot of sequels it is going to work just fine but if you want something new, with a new style and new ideas . . . .  forget it. 

Sounds like Hollywood already, right?

So there it is: I predict that big studios will pour zillions into “AI” movie machines and probably tell us all that it will bring “A new age of movies” or something like that, and no doubt there is will be some successes – but in the end they will still be derived from previous movies and media and not really anything original . . . . and you will still be able to see hints of the artifical nature of them in places.

Small Independent movie makers will pop up doing their best to provide real live action works that don’t go big on special effects and have real actors who you can see in other media and people will always connect with that because we need real identities to identify with in stories.

People want real people in their stories. Unreal people can still be attractive but they don’t have a real existence so they don’t have opinions or families or get in car accidents or have cousins or do dumb things that tell us they are real fallible humans.

As stated above, AI is a sales pitch, not a real thing.

Getting robot electronic brains and hardware to work well enough to replace humans in menial tasks (General Purpose AI) is a big, big, BIG challenge and our hardware and software is still not up to it.

Nowhere near it.

Robots that operate in pre-prepared situations and do limited operations such as the robots on a production line are plentiful and cheap because they are very simple.

General Artificial Intelligence is not near and when it is eventually reached (if ever) it will be running on huge server systems because the requirement is so huge that nothing on a desktop will have enough processing power and memory to do it. 

Don't believe the hype. 

A MATTER OF GRAVITY

 

 

(image credit: ABC Australia)
 

Take a look at fossilised dinosaur bones that have been dug up and put on display in museums around the world. These are reconstructed to portray dinosaurs that stand five, six, ten and up to eighteen metres high and theoretically could weigh up to 60 tons. Wow. Watch the movie “Jurassic Park” for recreations to see just how huge these things were. We also have fossils of giant insects and plants from the distant millenia.

Now consider the elephant. You know how big they get and how slow they must move because they weigh so much and they are pretty much at the limit of size for a land animal because bone and muscle just can’t hold up anything bigger.

Yes, you can argue this point : go ahead, prove me wrong, but I bet you can’t. Bone and muscle obey the same rules of engineering that steel and electric motors do.

Are you seeing what I see? Either our ideas of the strength of bone and muscle are very wrong or these dinosaurs could not have even walked on this planet under the current 9.8 M/S sq gravity.

I don’t think the archaeologists are wrong and that the dinosaurs were not that big or anything like that, I have a much simpler answer as to how these giant creatures walked the Earth:

The gravity was much lower back then.

This then brings the question of “What is gravity and how could it increase over time?”

I like to think of gravity as “Coactive mass”. The mass of Earth attracts us because all masses attract each other and it is millions of times bigger than we are.

If the force of gravity is the result of the total mass of the planet then as long as mass of Earth remains constant, gravity will remain the same.

Except it doesn’t.

Every day an average of three tons of solid matter in the form of asteroids, dust, rocks etc. falls from space and adds to the Earth’s mass. 3 tons a day over a million years is 365 million tons.

Yes, some gasous matter constantly leaks off the edge of the atmosphere in the solar wind but that is still well below 3 tons a day in total mass, and it’s gas, not solid.

Don’t take my word for this, you can check up on it yourself.

If a really big lump of matter suddenly hits the planet, the total mass will jump up and a lot of animals and plants will need to adapt or die. This event would also cause huge geological upsets as the forces and masses would sudddenly change.

Sounds familiar huh? Maybe those huge dinosaurs didn’t die because they starved in darkness, but because they could no longer walk. Much smaller creatures would be less affected by this of course.

If there were humanoids in the distant past they would have grown taller than modern man simply because the force of gravity was less. Did we have bones of a much taller race of men who came before us that are being hidden or destroyed? Some people are quite sure of this and there are a lot of records that suggest this - but it seems that someone has been busy getting rid of all of those giant skeletons. 

This brings me to the last big question about all of this. 

How come I seem to be the only person who has figured this out? 

Why is this not being spoken of out loud?

Maybe it is because when another large asteroid hits Earth, according to the ideas set forth here, it will not only cause environmental catastrophe but if it is big enough, all of our cities, infrastructure and systems will fail because they are not designed to stand under more than one gravity. 

Or then again, maybe people just don't like the idea that gravity might not be as consistent and constant as they like to imagine it.    

THE CNC PROJECT PART 5 - THE CABINET

 

The idea was to make the cabinet from 2020 aluminium extrusion since I had a lot of it and it would permit putting clear plastic sheet in the slots for windows to see what the machine is doing.

I could not find anyone else who had done this - all of this is my own idea.

 

Normally with 2020 I used internal corner brackets to join the parts and everything bolts together using bolts or nuts that fit the slots. This is not possible for most of the cabinet though as I need the slots you would normally use for internal corner brackets for the panels. The one exception is the back wall which needs to be removable after the frame is assembled so the panels are fixed to the back rather than in the slots. You do this using the “T” nuts and bolts. The neat trick with “T” nuts is that you can slip them into the slots and then as you rotate the bolt, the nut rotates 90 degrees until it locks in the slots and then grips. This is okay but in practice it can be a pain when you have a panel with six T nuts and you need to get them all to lock: if any of the bolt holes are even slightly off, the nuts may jam and not rotate.

 

The other option was cast metal corner blocks. They have fingers that slide into four slots and grub screws that dig into the metal in the slots to hold the bar ends in. I did the first assembly of the cabinet using these.

This may be fine for some things but for this project the grub screws just don't have enough grip. The front of the cabinet has two doors that hinge up and they need to be strong just to open without problems so I had to come up with something better.

I made two jigs: one to drill the holes in the ends of the bars with the corner block fitted and one to thread the hole in the centre of the 2002 bar.

The drilling jig was just a clamp in the drill press with a spot to allow the finger of the corner block to stick down.

To make a frame with window in it in 2020 extrusion:

1. I cut the 2020 lengths to fit the corner blocks. I used a drop saw with a fine toothed blade, makes a nice clean cut.

2. I rough assemble the frame and mark the fingers that need to be cut off: you only need three and there are four. Chop ONE of the flat protruding ones.

3. Glue the corner blocks to the end of the 2020 with JB Weld. Make sure you put enough JB Weld in there and let it set properly or things might not go according to plan. JB Weld is amazing, never seen a glue that sticks metal so well. Of course, the usual gluing rules apply: roughen surfaces and clean first.

A prepared end with the block glued on and the hole drilled: (X)

Note that the finger points down. It is a great help for aligning the other 2020 bar for assembly.

4. Mount the ends in the jig and mark, centrepunch and drill the bolt hole, then countersink it so the bolt is set into the corner.

The bolts are M5 x 20 countersunk Stainless (natch).

The Tapping Jig:

 

yup, cheep plastic but I don’t care, it holds the tap in line and that’s all that matters.

I used 3mm plexiglass and added a strip of “D” profile sealing strip on the edges on one side. The slots are 6mm so the foam strips fill the gap and as they are outside, if something does fly off inside and hit the plex the foam strips will absorb some of the impact.

The solid panels are all a special panel that I stumbled on – it is arylic plastic with a thin layer of aluminium on both sides. Not sure what the original purpose of it was though: I had some lying around so it went into the project.

 

The Hinges

I have two big doors that hinge upward so they have one external hinge and one internal. The external was easy as I had some plastic hinges designed to fit the 2020 system but the internal was a very different story.

They needed to go inside the cabinet and not collide with the clear panels – there was nothing around that would do this, so I bought some much bigger hinges and cut them down to fit. This was quite involved and the hinge pins turned out to be sleeved in plastic which melted when I cut the hinge plates with an abrasive disc cutter.

I ended up replacing this with some heatshrink which seems to have done the job just fine.

Here are the external hinges on top of the cabinet:

 

You can also see the Stainless Tee plates I used to fix the top crossbar on. The top ones are doubled for stiffness and this is one of those places where being able to loosen the nuts and slide the whole thing in the slots is a big advantage – it really helped get the doors to line up.

Now on to the internal hinges:

  The bolt hole arrangement tells you that you won’t buy any hinge to fit there.

The bumpers keep the doors apart when they are open.

I also added light bars to the outside of the cabinet and once again the JB weld saved me a lot of trouble: the LED strips came embedded in an alu extrusion and I was at first stumped by how to attach them – but then I saw someone on youtube called Project Farm. The guy tests all sorts of things with measuring equipment and bar charted results, and he reckoned JB Weld was good. Yes, his voice is a little bit high but that’s not his faultThanks, Project Farm.

I put in a lot of work into making my own limit switch mounts for the X and Y axes but the Z had me stumped and besides it looks like getting them to work with the controller would be a pain so I am going to get the Elite Upgrade kit which includes a new controller, servo motors, drag chains and limit switches. I am not pleased by junking stuff I just finished but there are standards here that really should be met.

I might try and use my drag chain system and some other parts too such as side fences to keep the y rails and crews cleaner.

Here is one of them:

 You can also see the plugs that seal off a lot of the holes in the mounting brackets which I bought off etsy in a set. A good idea to save lots of cleaning up later. 

Here is one of my 3D printed limit switch mounts :

 the blue bit is the reed switch. 

That's all for now,  gotta wait for my upgrade kit to arrive. 

The bulge in the cabinet still has me stumped though.