Fuck AI

You won't save the working class by yourself. Things are always changing, and under capitalism it is often for the worse. As another commenter said, CNC was the bane of lathe or mill machinists. There are still machinists, but now there are CNC operators as well. Who knows how things are going to be, but I can predict that there are still going to be lathe or mill machinists and CNC operators.

I'd say take the job. You live in the present. Being working class under capitalism necessarily means to be exploited by the powerful. It's the same here. Work to put food on your table, while you organize, educate people politically, and participate to decision making.

I know he's really busy right now, but you might try to get ahold of Benn Jordan about this and see if there's anything he can do to help you send just exactly the right kind of wrong data.

He has some experience in poisoning AI datasets.

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.

Do it but do it poorly. Don't show your expertise, teach it that noob shit.

Compliance non compliance.

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.

The irony is that CNC did this to the guys who manually worked milling machines and turned lathes.

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, Catholics. You can sue them for denying you that exemption if they refuse.

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

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 (?)

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.

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.

poison the data

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.

I remember when copywriters went through this exact same scenario like a year and a half ago.