Scrapyard AI
For researchers with limited resources, this offers a frugal approach to leverage powerful but discarded AI models, though the contribution is primarily conceptual and incremental.
The paper proposes using obsolete AI models (the 'AI scrapyard') for resource-constrained experimentation, exemplified by Project Nudge-x which repurposes legacy models to analyze mining site impacts on landscapes and lives.
This paper considers AI model churn as an opportunity for frugal investigation of large AI models. It describes how the incessant push for ever more powerful AI systems leaves in its wake a collection of obsolete yet powerful AI models, discarded in a veritable scrapyard of AI production. This scrapyard offers a potent opportunity for resource-constrained experimentation into AI systems. As in the physical scrapyard, nothing ever truly disappears in the AI scrapyard, it is just waiting to be reconfigured into something else. Project Nudge-x is an example of what can emerge from the AI scrapyard. Nudge-x seeks to manipulate legacy AI models to describe how mining sites across the planet are impacting landscapes and lives. By sharing this collection of brutal landscape interventions with people and AI systems alike, Nudge-x creates a venue for the appreciation of a history sadly shared between AI and people.