Author Archives: AI106 Blog – Robin Yu

Week 1 Summary

For the first week of DS106, I took my first steps into the course and I was honestly pretty surprised at how much dedication was required in the class. Like I detailed in my Goals for DS106 post, I honestly thought this was just a chill class where I can just cruise and do the bare minimum and move on with my A (no sugarcoating here), but after reading the syllabus and tackling the first blog assignment, I realized that my assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth.

After reading the syllabus, I started to randomly browse through the ds106.us site to see the works of previous classes. I fell into a rabbit hole and looked through it all for a solid 2 hours, and probably most definitely procrastinated on finishing the actual assignments for a little too long, all while the DS106 students of the past gave me advice on YouTube videos from the mid 2000’s where their #1 recommendation was TO NOT PROCRASTINATE. While doing all of this digging, I felt the magnitude of this course and the history behind it all. This is truly a community, one that transcends the class offered at UMW, and it made me feel like a new piece of the legacy going forward.

As a side note, I ran into posts from our DS106 instructors from way back then and found out that Professor Groom was the creator of the Domain of One’s Own program way back in the early 2000’s. I found it super interesting and kind of epic. If possible, I’d like to learn more regarding the process of making that happen at an institutional level.

Most of the account setup and installing WordPress is stuff I already completed prior to taking this class, so most of that wasn’t an issue. My first hurdle was writing my first DS106 blog post.

Dystopian Future and the Potential Negative Effects of AI – WALL-E Film Review

After taking a quick movie break from my other homework to re-watch WALL-E, thought I’d write this blog post like 15 minutes tops, but I was sorely mistaken. I got super into formatting everything how I wanted it, finding nice pictures to add onto it all, and the perfectionist inside of me came out. Kind of scary, but also really cool to be putting time into something more of a passion project rather than a mundane homework assignment. I think that’s where this class shows its charms over others at UMW.

I then wrote up my goals for this class in another post.

Goals for DS106

I didn’t think I’d get so personal with this one, but writing this one made me realize how much I enjoy sharing, and how there will be more opportunities in the future to delve into AI topics that I personally enjoy, such as the portrayal of AI in my favorite shows. It feels as if there isn’t a limitation to what I can explore in this class.

If I had to highlight the most important thing I learned this week, it would most definitely be to NOT PROCRASTINATE just as the 10 YouTube videos from DS106 students from the mid 2000’s yelled at me for. There will most likely be more and more assignments going forward, and I need to stay on top of them to be successful in this class.

Goals for DS106

As a computer science major, working on my digital creation skills will aid in my professional career in the future.

The statement above would be the best “honor roll” student response I could have fabricated, but to be completely honest, I enrolled in this class as a filler for the digital intensive for my graduation requirement. It also fell under the CPSC category and I was hoping to raise my departmental GPA. A bit insincere, but I’d rather say it how it is instead of sugar coating it. However…

Making that first film review post about WALL-E rekindled my love for blogging and making posts about random stuff. In the past, I ran a Instagram page about my journey to become a college golfer, recording swings, practices, and results. It was a way for me to express myself in the activity I enjoyed the most at the time.

Many of the younger kids might know what a Finsta is. It is a slang term for a “fake” Instagram where posts are more casual and is reserved for only your closest friends, used more as a blog rather than a snapshot portrait of your best life in a fabricated lens that most Instagram accounts nowadays adhere to. I really enjoyed posting on that account frequently with various posts about my favorite music, shows, rants about life, random silly photos…

Until I stopped.

I don’t really know why or how I got off the social media grind, but I just stopped. Maybe it was because of the stresses of graduating and finding a job after school, and having my time taken up by other responsibilities, but I’ve definitely felt a lack of connection within my circles. I’ve definitely seen some advantages of cutting back on social media, but there’s been days where I wonder what my best friends from high school have been up to. So much of the world is online now, and cutting back on the internet feels as if you’re pulling yourself out of your own little connected bubble.

While DS106 and the community is not private enough where I can share all of my personal life with my classmates, it definitely is an outlet where I can express myself in ways that I’ve never explored before, and I’m excited to utilize this platform to enhance the way I create things to share with my peers but also with the people most important to me. I don’t really know what I truly want out of this class yet, but I just want to start creating. Whatever form of media I need to create for the week, I’m excited for the challenge.

Dystopian Future and the Potential Negative Effects of AI – WALL-E Film Review

WALL·E | Disney Movies

If you looked at this film poster for Wall-E for the first time, you never would’ve guessed that the movie delves into the darker possibilities and repercussions of AI, and its eventual irreversible impact on planet earth. I watched WALL-E as a wee elementary schooler all the way back in 2008, and at the time, I was enamored by the personable and cute little characters that gave these robots humanlike characteristics.

I tend to write off Disney and Pixar movies as mostly cookie cutter stories without much substance, but I was pleasantly surprised by the themes explored in the movie, now being experienced from a different perspective in my early 20’s.

WALL-E highlights the effect of technology, corporate greed, and automation on our world as a whole, and is an example of how technology can potentially lead to our demise. In the film, earth’s ecosystem has already been ravaged due to environmental neglect and human negligence. The megacorporation Buy n Large evacuated all of the humans left on earth to live on a giant spaceship, where all of their daily lives are automated. Basic human tasks such as eating and cleaning are all done by AI drones, while the humans doze off and relax in their floating techno chairs, causing rampant obesity.

Before leaving the planet, the Buy n Large corporation left thousands of trash cleaning robots on earth, but only WALL-E remained standing. From the start of the film, WALL-E is shown to have a distinct personality, with humanlike characteristics while also enjoying it’s time on the barren planet earth all by itself. The characterization of WALL-E is the film’s way of depicting AI as potentially having fleshed out intelligence and a mind of it’s own in the future even without human influence around it, opening up the possibility to the audience that AI can potentially be developed to be more than just tools.

This injection of personality into a robot theme continues when WALL-E meets its love interest of the film, EVE. Yes, you heard me right, robot romance!

WALL·E story in short !. Approximately seven hundred years in… | by Gaurav Gandhi | Medium

EVE is an AI programmed to assist in potentially making earth habitable once more. When EVE visits earth, it meets WALL-E, who then gives EVE the sole plant remaining on earth. EVE takes a probe ship back to the spaceship along with the plant and her newfound friend WALL-E. When they return, the captain of the ship finds that EVE has lost the plant on their journey back, and blames WALL-E for the mishap. This is the point in the story where the rest of the sci-fi plot commences, and I probably can’t detail all of it here. In the end, the humans and the robots all return to planet earth, in hopes that they can change their habits of living for the better and slowly reclaim earth once more.

I’d like to highlight that the robot romance and making these seemingly sentient AI’s so personable created a lot of buzz during the late 2000’s, where topics of AI weren’t explored heavily in popular culture and media. The film successfully highlighted both the dark dystopian nature of AI and the negative effects it can have on the productivity of the human race, while also animating cute happy robots with big eyes that spotlights the potential of AI and human harmony with a hopeful outlook on the future.

On a side note, I decided to not used designated pronouns for WALL-E and EVE since they’re robots, but the Wikipedia page for this movie refers to them as he and she. Maybe it’s implied that these robots have assigned genders and should be referred to as such?

It was quite nice to revisit one of my childhood favorites on a snowy day in with some hot chocolate. I’ve been inspired to circle back to more of my favorite movies and shows in the near future. In particular, I want to revisit one of my favorite anime shows called Steins;Gate that delves into the world of advanced technology and time travel, but focuses in on AI themes in its sequel, Steins;Gate 0. Hopefully I can talk about this show in more detail for a future AI106 project.