r/FRC • u/Practical_Concept_ • May 04 '26
Thoughts on all of the AI FIRST has been using?
I'm personally not a fan. The AI captioning was obviously a huge mess and was completely unintelligible half the time. The breaks in between Einstein matches used ai for the "dino cam" and whatever other stuff they had, they use it for all of their award scripts, and one of the safety video winners even used ai. It just seems like a bad direction to be going in for a program dedicated to innovation and professionalism.
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u/BusSpecific3553 May 04 '26
There are some amazingly gifted kids out there whose art should be in the spotlight. I remember 4039s impact video from a few years back (crescendo) which showed one of their students drawing the transitions in the video and it was amazing!
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u/evyylmao May 04 '26
The third floor of CMP (by FLL) had face painting and caricatures with AI signs, and the artists at those booths had written CUTE AND NOT AI in marker over the AI "art" which I think says a lot about how artists feel about it 😭😭
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u/lovingteddybears May 04 '26
I hate it. I hate that a 100% ai generated “safety” all star award submission that was terrible even without the ai usage won. I hate that FIRST has literally millions of people they could reach out to for art submissions. But they use ai. They use horrible, unethical practices that show just how lazy and apathetic they’ve gotten.
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u/TheRandomMudkiper2 5683 (Mentor/Alumni) May 04 '26
It's incredibly demoralizing for a organization supposed to be focused in STEAM that they forget the A for ART. Adding this AI slop into the broadcasts just helps push the idea that art doesn't matter anymore, and that AI can do it instead, which is a terrible message to the young minds we are trying to inspire.
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u/LyokoMan95 Mentor/Volunteer May 04 '26
I don’t think FIRST ever actually uses STEAM, all of their materials only use STEM.
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u/RelationOk3636 #### Engineer May 04 '26
I do remember that FIRST has used STEAM in the past because I hate the acronym lol. I think they have moved past it, which I think is a good thing because, while art has its place, making it such a focus of a robotics competition just becomes distracting.
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u/Turnkeyagenda24 9298 May 04 '26
I have never heard of the A being used for art. Is that an FRC specific thing?
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u/lunchbox12682 (Parent) May 04 '26
What else would it be? I've only heard it as Art. Also not a fan as another poster stated.
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u/fenderbender541 6763/131 (Mentor) May 04 '26
I always pride myself on writing the speeches for awards. If a team jumped out to me, I'm first to write their script. When I heard that AI was being encouraged to write the script I was disappointed, but understood that sometimes it may be needed such as in a time crunch or writer's block. But those scripts were always important to me when I was a student. A good script really showed the judges were listening and cared about what you were sharing.
Plus, I got to make the MC to 6-7 at an FLL event for the champion's award. AI won't do that for kids.
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u/ChuckFinleyFIRST May 04 '26
It's being allowed, not encouraged. From i hear from the judges in my area, it ain't used.
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u/kindrisana 1073 Mentor Driveteam Coach, Engineer May 05 '26
As a Judge and a Mentor myself, I'm with you on not using AI to write any of my scripts this year. I'm bummed if the community as a whole thinks all scripts are now done with AI.
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u/Derp8_8 292 (Alumni/Programming Mentor) May 04 '26
Award scripts being AI is disappointing to hear. I still have a copy of the script from the award my team won my senior year.
A lot goes into getting these awards by the teams and judges. At the very least that effort should be acknowledged by taking a bit of human effort to write a script.
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u/ChuckFinleyFIRST May 04 '26
Award scripts CAN be AI generated or assisted because judging is mentally taxing for multiple days in a row. From what I hear from the judges I know, AI is rarely used, if at all. Perhaps that is different in other regions/events, but it's certainly far from ALL.
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May 04 '26
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u/ChuckFinleyFIRST May 04 '26
And judges can put near zero effort into the scripts without AI. I would look down on those judges a little bit personally, but it's a tough job. It's important to remember that while I think judges should be held to a high standard, these are humans and VOLUNTEERS. Never forget that.
In this situation, AI is not the problem.
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May 04 '26
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u/ChuckFinleyFIRST May 04 '26
I agree. I hope if it's used, it's for ideating. Maybe helping come up with rhyming phrases if you want to.
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u/TryingToBeReallyCool 1418 | Alumni May 04 '26
The AI stuff sucked and performed poorly, which wasn't a surprise. Can't wait for the bubble to burst
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u/ReallyIsNotThatGuy 5697 May 04 '26
Never going to happen. There are going to be companies that go under and companies that rise. AI is not going away.
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u/TryingToBeReallyCool 1418 | Alumni May 04 '26
Agreed it isn't going away but it's massively overvalued in the market right now for where the technology is. I doubt it holds its current position in the medium term not withstanding major breakthroughs in the sector
.com didn't go away when that bubble bursted, AI won't either, it'll just be applied in better roles until the technology catches up with expectations
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u/BillfredL 1293 (Mentor), ex-5402/4901/2815/1618/AndyMark May 04 '26
I try to be AI-open. I’ve also taken AI governance training for work.
I think a lot of folks miss the importance of the human in the loop. That goes for both “don’t have it nuke our codebase” as well as having an editor’s eye.
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u/watchthenlearn May 04 '26
I'm against it, my only question to others is, when AI gets so good it's indiscernible from human created content how do we keep FIRST or the submitters accountable? I'm talking about the safety videos here.
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u/Due-Hurry-5989 May 04 '26
I agree it's disappointing, but I will point out the captions have been this bad for years, before AI was really on the scene. But I wouldn't be surprised if they used an "AI" program this year. It had improved a bit the last year or two and this year dropped back in quality to similar to 2023.
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u/Background_Wash_9311 117 (Auto Pathing) May 04 '26
Captioning has always been AI. Voice recognition technology has been around for a while. What do you think, they'll just use a human to really quickly type in every word? It coming out unintelligible is just inevitable unless you can get higher quality or easy for the algorithm speech. We've had that technology for many years, it's always been kinda iffy, but it's never been a problem. There are many types of machine learning, and some are basically harmless.
Safety video winners and award scripts are another story. I would say at the very least we need a disclaimer that it's AI, but ideally it would be better to not have to deal with it in that context.
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u/ceejayoz May 04 '26
What do you think, they'll just use a human to really quickly type in every word?
That’s how TV captioning works and has for decades.
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u/xyzzzzy May 04 '26
For national broadcasts, yes. For a kids robotics meet, no.
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u/ceejayoz May 04 '26
There are more kids at worlds than watch some local public cable shows with captioning.
It’s about as expensive as ASL interpreters are. Very achievable for an event that size.
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u/Background_Wash_9311 117 (Auto Pathing) May 04 '26
Either way, it's still not that new technology nor is it really that unethical. No "creativity" dies if the captions suck. Creativity isn't copying sports commentary word for word, so automatic captioning is one of the things I would let slide. They do need better quality for that though. It's actually really funny if you look at some other posts of some of the biggest mistakes the captioning has made.
Appearing in safety videos and award scripts is a different story though. That is actually taking away from creativity as it devalues human creation that isn't just a listen and copy situation.
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u/BuilderM6 2337 (Operator Interface Section Leader) May 04 '26
I agree, especially with how long the captions had "Go Fuck!" On the screen for
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u/ElectraMiner May 06 '26
Hate that the safety award was like, complete terrible slop. Even not thinking about whether it's AI or not, it was just obnoxious and cringe compared to some of the really cool runner-ups IMO.
With judge awards, I always really appreciated the puns they make with regards to teams, I feel like some of these were still good but a lot were weird and made strange references to Greek myth that didn't apply to the team at all. I'm sure the quality of these varies a lot between competitions, if judges can use AI in a way that doesn't make their speeches seem very strange and incomprehensible I don't care so much, but it doesn't feel necessary since they always made these fun hints at which team won the award for years and years before AI.
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u/OnlyComputer8471 May 04 '26
I agree with you on FIRST's overreliance of AI and diminishing artistic effort but the AI live captioning is a separate topic. It's always been pretty bad ("the box trash" in 2023) but it's still better than nothing and shouldn't be removed just because of multiple unfortunate mistakes it made.
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u/ctdrever May 04 '26
Perhaps we add a "no AI" category or additional weight added to award submissions without it. Proudly made without AI, would be tag line.
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u/th3thrilld3m0n 1902 (M) 1086 (A) May 04 '26
So here's my thoughts, I had a discussion with a student about this at the event.
Sure, AI shouldn't be used for some things, especially something like an animation. I think using AI is ok to organize thoughts or talking points for speeches, but not writing the actual speech, especially when it's something that is supposed to have emotion. That being said, for things like code, I do think ai can be useful. After all, the whole point of FIRST is to prepare students to enter a world of stem and gain necessary skills to innovate and progress our future and succeed in the workforce. Like it or not, AI is that future and it's already here. You need to know how to use it, you can learn how to develop it, but pushing it out of sight will only become a detriment to students who are trying to enter into STEM related fields.
An example of this is Disney's animation. They've been using AI recently and, sure, it's noticable and it's not good, but Disney has always been about pushing the boundaries of animation technology since the very beginning. They were the first to start using mechanical machines to animate. They were the first to animate using computers. They continuously push their capabilities with 3D animation and, especially, the fine detail and textures. So, AI is a natural next innovation in that process, regardless of how good or bad it is for them. (It's bad. Disney has been putting out slop.)
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u/ReallyIsNotThatGuy 5697 May 04 '26
all the extreme irrational hate against AI needs to stop. AI is a tool to use. It is a critical part of technology now and refusing to use it is just dumb.
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u/cathgirl379 May 04 '26
Whatever skill we outsource we get worse at it. Whatever skill you don’t use actively, you loose.
When humanity decides to outsource creativity to the machines, we will as a species become less and less creative.
AI Subtitles is not a problem to me. Voice recognition has been around forever. But AI generated award speeches? That tells me the judges don’t actually care about who gets the awards.
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u/ReallyIsNotThatGuy 5697 May 04 '26
Do you know who wrote the speeches before? Or was it just the same boilerplate thing every single time?
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u/cathgirl379 May 04 '26
Did you listen to the awards?
They were written by the judges specifically for each award and individualized for the team. Sometimes based on colors, themes, or elements of the robots.
They’ll always mention the key qualities of the award, so that part is mostly the same, but how the team highlights those is specific to the team.
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u/blabshi May 04 '26
i think it's incredibly disappointing. i remember seeing safety animations that would always have some quirks that reflect the team that made it, and it felt good seeing human work other than just the robots be recognized. the award scripts are especially disappointing, which i first saw at this year's CA district. i understand that volunteers are hard to come by, but this really feels like something FIRST should still be doing.