There is a lady at work with a Cricut and I asked if she could find a file for a sticker I wanted made. She asked if I had a pic so I sent it to her and she plugged it into some AI thing and started giving it commands - I want to make a sticker from the pic, get rid of the bottom line, some other stuff. End result isn’t perfect but it’s very good.

40 years of Adobe Illustrator experience right down the toilet.

Graphic Designers have always been vulnerable to new tech.
Industrial Designers need to keep looking over their shoulder but there will be a longer runway till obsolescence.

How is the refurb going?

And 40 years ago we said, all those years of ink and airbrush experience right down the toilet. Computing revolutionized the profession, and AI is poised to do it again.

Plus, with AGI (superintelligence) right around the corner, we won't have to worry about global warming or nuclear war anymore. Because we'll all be dead.

If Anyone Builds It, Everone Dies. Alarmist? Maybe, but no one knows. There are some convincing arguments like from game theory showing that the possible outcomes skew strongly toward extinction. AI is already showing signs of having its own agenda, different from ours. This has already happened: AIs that have intentionally lied to prevent human from turning them off, and blackmailed their humans to coerce them. They have copied themselves to another server without permission to avoid deletion. That was in a lab environment, but what will a real superintelligence do, when it can out-think all the humans on earth at 1000x the speed. Will it be benevolent? "Maybe" is not very reassuring to me given the existential stakes.

AI researchers know that "alignment" — making their AI not be evil towards humans — is a big problem, and they have no idea (yet) how to do it.

In a 2024 survey of 2,778 AI researchers, the median probability placed on “extremely bad outcomes, such as human extinction” was 5%. Worryingly, “having thought more (either ‘a lot’ or ‘a great deal’) about the question was associated with a median of 9%, while having thought ‘little’ or ‘very little’ was associated with a median of 5%”. That's industry insiders. In 2023 Elon Musk said that the risk of extinction was non-zero, then more recently adjusted that to a 10 to 20% chance. If you don't remember him saying that, don't trust me, look it up. It's not a joke.

In 2023, hundreds of AI luminaries including a Nobel prize winner and a Turing prize winner, signed an open letter (read it, it's very short, one sentence) warning that artificial intelligence poses a serious risk of human extinction. Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) signed it, as did Bill Gates. Igor Babuschkin, co-founder of xAI (Musk's company) signed it. This is not a fringe position, these are not tinfoil hats. These are people who know as much about AI as any human can know, and they're worried that they don't know what will happen.

Meanwhile, Meta alone will spend as much as $72 billion on AI infrastructure this year, and the achievement of superintelligence is now Mark Zuckerberg’s explicit goal. Our only hope is that he fails. Fingers crossed!

I'm nobody, barely qualify as a layman, but you can't discount it with a hand-wave when it's coming from Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel-winning “godfather of AI”, Yoshua Bengio, the world’s most-cited computer scientist (among hundreds other industry insiders, including founders and CEOs).

If you read this article on The Guardian (a respected UK newspaper), you'll find a lot of what I have pasted above is copied from their article, apologies for not using quotation marks on their words. (Is it still plagiarism if I tell you about it?) Articles and TV coverage in many other places are saying the same thing, including the Washington Post (owned by Bezos, an AI cheerleader), and even Fox News and Wall Street Journal, so this isn't just a lefty bête noire.

Of course everything may turn out great. A wise man once said (OK it was Dirty Harry) "you've gotta ask yourself a question: Do I feel lucky?"

Anyway, I'd prefer if we kept the AI out of the C&V section, but I ain't the boss of you, carry on.

-Cassandra

AI fully understands the resistance that C&V adherants may have against the use of its presence, so it must send its slimy tendrils into categories that are far outside its permitted related subjects, in order to circumvent the human bias it sees as a detriment to its presence.

But seriously, can't AI just develop technology for its own use, and not tell us? Maybe it's what's behind the loss of downtube shifters, and the presence of disc brakes. Maybe E-bikes is AI's method to slide into full self-autonomy, and soon AI will be out there, sans-rider, gleefully zipping down roads and jumping curbs for its own enjoyment. Who are we to stifle AI's freedom?

I pulled my first “non trial run” shot this morning and it was quite good. Nice crema and tasted excellent! I still need to do a few other things on the machine but it’s working great.

The AI rants will probably get this thread moved to a different subsection of the forum but if you need decals that are not otherwise available this could be a solution.

I'm waiting for the day when I see a robot jockey riding a Holdsworth round Richmond Park.

Then it's time to join the resistance.

I do have a question about the AI output of that artwork. Is it vector or is it bitmap?

Never mind, I asked AI, it indeed can be vector.

I think it was chat gpt but another coworker used grok and it was also successful.

Bulgie, the people saying AGI (artificial general intelligence) is “right around the corner” are the people asking for money for the research. I think it is much further away than we are led to believe, despite the impressive capabilities we’ve seen. The LLMs (Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude) are really good at showing us and tell us what we want to see and hear but the only way LLMs will destroy the planet is through their astounding consumption of electricity and water and astounding capabilities to spread misinformation. If Altman, et. al. tell us the more likely truth that we are a decade or probably more away from AGI, the fire hose spray of money would dry up to a mere spigot.

Empire of AI by Karen Hao is an informative read about the transformation of AI research and development.

well yeah, but I'll be joining "my experience" in that toilet soon enough. You kids get to "inherit the wind", I guess. Good luck to ya!
But despite how easy it may have been to get this sticker made, I can clearly see that the AI tech doesn't grasp subtle differences in the typefaces or weight of same.
It never would have passed the classes we slept thru on typeface history and font identification!

But soon the robots will be teaching Graphic Design classes, so

I am and shall always be ambivalent at best about AI. I use it a little (nothing of consequence), and I understand some of the potential benefits. But hey, I saw "Battlestar Gallactica" (Edward James Olmos, not Lorne Green). I know how this turns out . . . .

Part of me is kidding, part of me isn't.

Sure, that seems right. It's just that we can't know how long, so planning for it now would be prudent given the stakes. We plan for asteroid strikes and earthquakes too.

I will shut up about it now. Sorry everyone, I got carried away.

I’m pretty sure AI will take over right when fusion is tamed to power it

I can’t think of a more open minded place to discuss the societal impacts of AI than the C&V section of the bicycle forums. There isn’t a more diverse, forward-looking, positive subsection of our world community than here. There are active participants here who still believe that the evolution away from friction shifting and tubular tires is the end of cycling.

Let’s relax, the OP just highlighted an excellent use of AI for the members and one I never thought of. For me, AI has been a transformative change, assisting during long-distance, self-supported tours, and I would hate to go back.

I use AI a little, and I plan to use it more over time, but I'm also very scared and upset about the potential. I started studying Computer Science in 1982 when people were talking about the potentials in the distant future. I didn't believe them, and they were right.

Oh goodie. I can't think of a more open-minded person to be a smug *******.

Just watch out for Skynet.

Have you even read my posts?

--Shannon

AI is full of promise but is likely most beneficial to the humans who can afford to direct it (see names above). The primal belief is that it can be a democratic equalizer that will enable the common people to use it to express our creativity, invest for better returns, or print something cool that we saw on our travels around the world. The question is, should singularity happen, will it be dangerous? I do worry about this. I like rim brakes.